Miami-Dade County court cases to be viewable online

Southern Florida may have lost Lebron James, but residents of Miami-Dade County can take solace in the fact that the area is gaining digitized court cases. 

Courts all over the country have done away with paper records, and the technology necessary to digitize cases will soon be implemented in Southern Florida as well, according to the Daily Business Review.  Family, small claims and civil court documents will all be available online, and accessible from mobile phones and tablets. At first the files will only be accessible by attorneys but they will be opened up for public viewing by the summer. 

The only files that will remain physical are those relating to criminal cases. These will remain on paper as the court system upgrades its computer server – a procedure that could take a year or two, Harvey Ruvin, clerk of the courts, told the publication. E-filing has been mandatory in Florida for some time, but viewing the cases could only be done in courthouses. Paperless filing and viewing is catching on all over the country, and Miami-Dade County is just the latest to digitize. 

Even the Supreme Court – long mired in laggard technology – has recently made the decision to switch over to e-filing. If even the Supreme Court, stereotypically a Luddite of a court, is willing to acknowledge that document management software is the future of case storage and viewing, then its no surprise that courts across the country have already made similar moves, or intend to soon.  

Typically when companies, government branches or schools implement content management systems they see a boost in efficiency while simultaneously cutting costs in regard to storage, printing, copying and more. In the case of courts, online storage also provides additional transparency and accessibility for the public. 

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