Scott County Courthouse is the first to achieve completely digital records

Not only does this fall bring on hoodie weather, pumpkin spice lattes and football season, but also the finish line for a decades-long initiative in one Iowa county. The cover of the December 2004 Iowa Lawyer magazine featured an article on the Scott County Courthouse project to digitize all court records. Eighteen years later, Scott County will be the first courthouse in Iowa to maintain all records in a completely digital format.

In early 2003, the Seventh Judicial District judges and court administration partnered with the Scott County Board of Supervisors to develop an imaging project that would convert closed case files into electronic images. At the time, the board was interested in downsizing the courthouse’s footprint at a storage space being utilized at the county’s Tremont Avenue facility for the storage of their records. The court had 1,566 banker boxes full of court files and another 300 boxes of miscellaneous records stored in the facility. 
Scott County Clerk of Court Julie Carlin, head of the imaging project, was excited to start the project because, as she stated, “I know what it’s like to go through and find the records.” The offsite storage area was being used to store files because there was not enough space in the courthouse. Julie described that when clerks were assigned to find court records, the work involved trips to offsite storage facilities or going downstairs to the courthouse basement. If something was filed incorrectly, it was described as a “nightmare” to locate. 

“You would have to go up a ladder and get out 50-pound banker boxes … It was an accident waiting to happen, and we are lucky no one got injured,” she added. The number of physical files to search was overwhelming. If you laid the banker boxes from the Tremont Avenue facility side-by-side, it would occupy the length of nearly seven football fields. 

Julie described how the courthouse averages around 25 calls per day to certify records. In each county, the clerk of court office receives court documents, adds a file stamp and puts them in court files, with all documents for one case in one file. Many requests also come from attorneys in in the county needing records for job or college applications. 
Judge J. Hobart Darbyshire was very involved in the investigation, planning and implementation of the entire digitization process. Judge Darbyshire said, “It was a mammoth project from the start.” 

He described how the Iowa Supreme Court wanted to initiate this type of project starting in the latter part of the 90s. The supreme court was able to include an item in their budget that allowed state court to accumulate and put money in a separate fund to convert court documents and build efficiencies into the filing of documents. He said, “Federal courts were ahead of state courts by quite a bit, with the ability to just write a check for electronic filing.” At the time, federal courts were working on a digitization project to get rid of storing and filing paper. Across the country, state courts now vary in the amount of electronic filing, and Judge Darbyshire considers Iowa as a leader in the nation. 

In the early 2000s, Iowa hit a budget crisis and the funds allotted for the digitization of court files project came to a halt. Iowa counties were experiencing a need to maintain storage for court files due to the law stating that every court file needs to be preserved forever. Effort was made to preserve the records which date back to before Iowa became a state. For example, the estate documents of Antoine LeClaire, who is credited with the founding of the city of Davenport, are dated at lease six years prior to when Iowa officially became a state in 1846. 

The total budget raised for the start of the project was just over $165,000 and was made up of unspent funds from a previous year, a grant from the county’s Riverboat Development Authority and reimbursement from a breach of contract settlement from a contractor that had been previously hired to image probate files in Cedar County. After a request for proposal was developed, ComMicrofilm Company based in Springfield, IL, was hired to assist with the project. 
Two Kodak high speed scanners, nine desktop computers, two servers, high-capacity hard drives, a flat-bed scanner for photographs and a CD burner were purchased. Hardware and software were installed. The county agreed to provide six full-time temporary employees to assist, and six days of training were provided to courthouse staff. 

The workload of the digitization of files was time consuming and included preparing files to be copied, digitized and imaged. Specifically, county employees were tasked with taking apart court files stored in 11x17 inch folders. Care was taken to remove staples from documents, repair torn pages and enhance materials that were difficult to read or needed to be made legible as an image. The case documents are now indexed in the electronic management system by name, partial name and date. 
With the project nearing completion, more than 678,104 records, each with multiple pages, and 17.2 million images have successfully been converted to digital files. Julie said, “Everything has run as smooth as it could. We just kept pushing forward.” 

Now, instead of making the trip to an offsite facility, climbing a ladder and searching through large filing boxes, court files can be found with a “touch of a finger,” as Julie described. Also, there are three copies of each record saved in multiple platforms, making it seemingly impossible for digitalized records to be lost. 

Deputy Clerk of Court Darci Smith was the project coordinator from the beginning and has been with the clerk’s office for 42 years. She said that the success of the imaging project can in part be attributed to “good judges with visions.” Before his retirement, Judge James E. Kelley was very involved in planning and implementation. He was responsible for daily oversight of the integrity and security of the system. 

Now retired, Judge Darbyshire shared this sentiment with his comment, “I think in a lot of respects we were lucky. Chief Judge John Nahra was very interested in pursuing this.” 

For Judge Darbyshire, the imaging of files meant it was much easier to retrieve court files, which was a big deal. Every Friday, two employees from the clerk’s office would spend the entire day retrieving and replacing court files. They would come to work in old clothes because it was a dirty job to get stored files out. He said, “It was filthy dirty. They may as well be working on a pig farm.” If a judge needed a court file to look at, it was a time-consuming process to get that file. The digitization of the files was a relief to the clerk’s office and offered a tremendous advantage to judges with the ability to get the imaged file immediately. 

For other county courthouses looking to take on digitization of court files, Judge Darbyshire said “planning is so important.” The type of equipment needed to do this type of work is a consideration. A reliable contractor that understands what needs to be done is critical. Darbyshire also recommends getting the state IT department involved to be sure there is compatibility with the electronic filing system that the state uses. 

When the project started, Julie admittedly “never thought it was going to be completed,” and said to herself, “This will never finish in my lifetime.” After 38 years with the state, she is retiring on Oct. 31, just in time to see the project to conclusion.
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https://www.iowabar.org/?pg=IowaLawyerMagazine&pubAction=viewIssue&pubIssueID=20104&pubIssueItemID=95063