NICK GOSNELL
Hutch Post
HUTCHINSON, Kan. — The Kansas Supreme Court issued Administrative Order 2023-CC-074 on Monday confirming clerk offices in the appellate courts and all district courts—except the court in Johnson County—remain unable to receive electronic filings at this time.
Reno County DA Thomas Stanton notes that even though he's been a lawyer long enough to have done paper filing before, it still creates hurdles for his office.
"We have to paper file everything," Stanton said. "Complaints, motions, warrants, any kind of document, motions to revoke, anything like that, we have to do paper filing. Although I've been around for a long time, some of my staff hasn't. I had one of my staff come in and take a case that I'm working on that's an older case and take a look at how it happened back in 2015. We have to handle everything down to the court."
Courts are open and operating, but it's a problem on their end, too.
"Courts can't access their files, either," Stanton said. "Nothing can be electronically filed. They don't have the same kind of filing system we have. I'm an old dinosaur type of person and I've still got paper files. That's what the courts are relying on, when our attorneys go to court. If there are motions, they have to be delivered."
This will have a real effect on the schedule for cases, especially if defense counsel is not local and ends up having to mail in paper filings.
"It will slow things down," Stanton said. "We'll have to make sure that the courts have copies of all the motions. They won't be immediately accessible by the courts. It will take awhile to get that paperwork all to the court. Then the court will have to figure out a way, each judge will have to figure out a way to organize all of the paperwork that is coming in to their office, because there are no paper files in the courts."
For the period of this electronic outage, there is no way for the public to access the ongoing records, either. The hope is to have the system back up and running electronically in a couple of weeks.
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