Kansas City court goes digital.

• Position: COURT RECORDS

It's being called the biggest digital transformation of a municipal court in the United States, and other cities are watching closely.

"It is the first municipal court to go end-to-end paperless," said Austin, Texas-based technology consultant and project manager, Alan Teeple, in an interview with The Kansas City Star. He said courts in other cities, including St. Louis and Memphis, Tenn., are keeping an eye on Kansas City, Mo.

Kansas City's new paperless court system was set to go live August 29, according to The Star, and it is a radical departure from the municipal court's 40-year-old law enforcement and records system it is replacing.

The old system relied on an ancient IBM mainframe, an extinct computer language, and a mountain of paper records, The Star said. Presiding Municipal Judge Katherine Emke said the court was drowning in a sea of 1.5 million active paper files. Each year brought a deluge of 320,000 tickets and 30,000 phone calls every month.

According to The Star, paper records were strewn throughout the building, and data entry clerks made mistakes. It often took an hour or more to pull just one person's file. Tickets, which were kept in giant rotational filing machines, would get stuck together or lost. If the machines broke, The Star said, only one 79-year-old maintenance person in the city knew how to repair them.

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