Photo by Jeffrey Saulton Andrea Weaver, an employee in the Wood County Circuit Court Clerk’s Office, reviews a document she scanned into the court’s Courtplus scanning system.

PARKERSBURG — Since the first case was filed with the Wood County Circuit Court in 1799, a lot of paper has been used to document every order, motion and decision, but that era is over.

Carole Jones, clerk of Wood County Circuit Court, said on Dec. 20, 2017, the order came from the county’s judges to stop adding new filings to paper files immediately, scan all new cases and those documents awaiting processing and use the Courtplus system as the only method of filing.

Jones said Wood County is the last of West Virginia’s 55 counties to make the switch to a paperless circuit court.

New documents have been scanned since June and a paper file was maintained for each case, but Jones said the Dec. 20 order from the judges was unexpected. That means the deputy clerks no longer maintain a black book or ledger of hearing results.

“We have done some scanning of older cases, ones we have been pulling a lot or if it’s not really a large file,” she said. “Mainly this is daily stuff.”

As for older records, some dating back to the earliest days of the county, Jones has applied for a grant to hire personnel to scan them, but she will not know if she will receive the grant and if she does, nothing will be done until the money is available in July. Jones said most pre-1800 files have been destroyed by fire and flood or misplaced.

“When scanned, the documents go into the Courtsplus and that is a system from the state Supreme Court,” she said. “Anybody in that system go view any of the records from any county, unless there is a restriction, like a juvenile case.”

Jones said the order covers all divisions of the circuit court except for the family court.

“We are scanning the family court documents but we are not as caught up as we are with the circuit court items,” she said. “But hope to have them all before too long.”

Jones said the big question is when will the clerks be allowed the destroy the original documents.

“Well, the order doesn’t really tell me what to do with the paper,” she said. “There is a hope the judges will do a subsequent order to make it more clear.”

For now she said the deputy clerks are scanning documents and keeping them in boxes waiting for the next step.

“I’ve talked to other clerks who are doing scanning or e-filing,” she said. “Many of them are keeping the paperwork in boxes under their desks after they are scanned just in case questions might come up.”

Jones said the court has a retention schedule for other files, but it doesn’t address what to do with scanned documents.

“Scanning is recognized as a permanent storage for records, it used to be microfilming,” she said. “Therefore it should be OK to let the others go.”

For now Jones said the only change, other than scanning everything, is it does not go into a paper file.

Jones said the process takes longer then they thought it would.

“There are several steps to scanning,” she said. “They have to check a list for the document they want to do and index it to the right court, case number and year, it’s more than just scanning,” she said. “There are security levels from public to expunged.”

Jones said the order to scan is part of a transition to e-filing, but no date has been set for that step.

Jones said her deputy clerks put everything into a computer system called AS400, one that has been in use for years. It keeps the docket sheet up to date, assigns case numbers and does the bookkeeping related to cases, but it is not tied into the Courtsplus system.

Concerns about security of the records have been addressed, Jones said.

“The West Virginia Supreme Court does the backup for the Courtsplus,” she said. “My understanding is it is backed up daily in several different locations across the state.”

Wood County Circuit Court Judge Jason Wharton said the state Supreme Court wants all courts to have e-filing, within a few years.

“All the courts are now scanning documents,” Wharton said. “We began in June and that created some difficulties with them trying to keep a paper file and an electronic file. Moving forward the Supreme Court already determined we will be moving to e-filing, although per se litigants will have a way to file in person by paper; but the vast majority of the filing will be done electronically and it will be a digital file only at that point.”

Wharton said it was decided to go ahead and eliminate paper files and make sure the filings were current and could be used by others besides the court.

“It is important the court file, when somebody comes in to look at it, is up to date,” he said. “Since we are moving in the direction of electronic files, it made sense to rather than go backward and eliminate the electronic files and only go with paper files, to just simply go ahead and eliminate the paper files now so that any time anybody looks at a file they know they are looking at an up-to-date file that has everything it is supposed to have.”

So far there are no changes in public access to court files. They can still view them in the clerk’s office and arrangements have been made to have a dedicated terminal to access the electronic file. Wharton said older files will mostly likely still be in paper form, but newer files will be digital from the start. He said attorneys will have access after e-filings is instituted, but for now that is a pilot program in a few counties.

Last week when the January grand jury returned its indictment, Wharton said he was able to review the first 10 cases assigned to him before he left for the day and has since downloaded all the cases assigned to him.

Wharton said he has been using electronic files since he took office last year.

“One advantage is there are thousands of files, being signed in and out by different people, and sometimes files would come up missing or misfiled,” he said. “This eliminates that entirely. That was a concern we heard: What if something is scanned into the wrong file?

“The way I looked at it, if you took a piece of paper and put it in the wrong file and then put it in a file cabinet, you are looking for a needle in a haystack, if you scan it to the wrong file you are looking for a needle in a haystack, but it just happens to be a digital haystack. It’s no different.”