(3/28/99)

People who work in our public safety system say it's half paperwork. Police, prosecutors, and court workers all spend a significant amount of time typing, filing, and signing the forms involved in bringing a bad guy to justice.

Now, a new project in the Utah Courts is leading the way toward a better, faster process. News Specialist Pamela Davis has more.

Detective Mike Welch of the Salt Lake City Police Department says, "Better than 50 percent of my time is doing paperwork on fugitive cases."

Detective Welch's job is to track down fugitives - people who are running from the law. He says he spends most of HIS time running from office to office.

"The biggest part of my time is spent coming over to the D.A.'s office, picking up the paperwork, reviewing it to make sure there are no mistakes.."

It's a process that takes this detective 45 seconds to describe, and sometimes takes days to carry out. Workers at the District Attorney's office have some of the same problems.

Informatin Systems Coordinator, Carol Earl, says, "They would spend hours sitting there, reviewing all of the case and everything, and then having to do the data entry, or write it on a piece of paper, then give it to a secretary."

All of that is about to change as Utah's Court System prepares to go online. The Electronic Filing Project is supposed to revolutionize the jobs of police, prosecutors, and court workers.

With the click of a mouse, what used to take days could take minutes. They've already started testing it by e-filing some criminal cases. They took two minutes.

Mike Welch says the new system will have essentially the same effect as putting more detectives on the streets.

"Instead of sitting back, having to do all the paperwork, we can do it much more rapidly, and it gives us more time to spend out doing investigations."

At courthouses, the new system will become a sort of "SuperClerk." It will assign judges, assign case numbers, keep track of cases...24 hours a day, 7 days a week, without ever asking for a pay raise.

Alex Kravtsov, a Court Programmer-Analyst says, "Well, it's a great relief, because now the clerks are free to do other things than just enter data."

It probably won't be long now before police, lawyers, and judges will be able to e-mail papers, e-file motions, issue e-rulings and digitally sign them. And it appears the Utah court system will be the first in the nation to go fully on-line.

The new computer system is expected to save thousands of hours of work each year. Eventually, all public information will be available over the Internet.