Somebody please tell me why the Florida Supreme Court hasn't made e-filing happen by now.
We live in the fourth largest state in the nation in the second decade of the 21st century -- yet justices and the Florida Bar allow the state to remain in a dusty, archaic Bleak House of inaccessible court records.
What's going on?
Last week Florida Supreme Court justices extended deadlines requiring documents in appellate cases to be filed electronically. They had to. Their offices were nowhere near ready for prime time. E-filing had a deadline of Dec. 1, but -- oops -- that was Saturday. Now the new, absolutely-positively-must-be-e-filed date is Feb. 27 next year.
The Supreme Court also delayed a similar requirement for the state's five district courts of appeal. Those folks first were required to accept electronic documents beginning April 1; now there's going to be a "phasing in" across the appellate circuits beginning next summer, starting July 22 in the 2nd DCA and finishing Dec. 27 in the 1st DCA.
I don't understand what all the fuss is about. And neither would you if you were around just after the turn of the century to see the rabbits Chief Administrative Law Judge Sharyn Smith pulled out of her hat to get a computer system up and running for the Florida Division of Administrative Hearings (DOAH).
In the floppy disk days -- when most people were still in denial about the computer age -- when legislators called computerizing records "something out of 'Star Wars'" --Smith took on a demo to computerize docketing and virtually all other records in DOAH.
The big feat, the demo project, was putting all of the records of every workers' comp case in Florida on line -- all 150,000 of them. It cost $75,000 a quarter and it took her a year to finish the job.
"This was before Google," she told me. "We had to write our own search engine. And we went back to 1974 to get these records. Nobody had ever counted the number of workers' comp cases we had, nobody had any idea until we finished our work."
By "we," Smith is talking about her team. It was more like an army. To finish on time she hired dozens of students, worked them triple shifts and when necessary, let them sleep in the office. Think of it -- going backward, plowing through near-endless stacks of paper files to find 150,000 workers' comp claimants.
Smith should have been given a Friend of the First Amendment award for her work in 2001. But she wasn't. Nevertheless, few people did more than Sharyn L. Smith to unlock Florida government's unwieldy information vault and make government records more accessible.
She is retired now. But she keeps an eye on efforts to complete electronic filing in the courts.
I asked her why she thinks it's taken so long and why it's so muddled. "No one is chief judge long enough to get stuck into the job. They rotate every two years," she said. "And then a chief judge might not have the interest or the skills."
She said that at one point Google or Microsoft -- she can't remember which -- was willing to partner with the state to get all records online -- every department in Tallahassee. But where it counted, there wasn't enough interest.
"Somebody has to stop and make e-filing a priority," she said. "We could be dragging this out forever; people will be telling you that it's costing a zillion dollars and it's impossible to do."
Well, no, it isn't.
Sharyn Smith proved it isn't impossible, even under the crudest and most improvisional of circumstances.
Reach Nancy Smith at nsmith@sunshinestatenews.com or at (850) 727-0859.
