Law Practice Management Tips & Tricks
| Publication year | 2024 |
| Citation | Vol. 93 No. 1 Pg. 24 |
| Pages | 24 |
January 2024
Court System Contingency Planning
By Larry N. Zimmerman, Zimmerman & Zimmerman P.A.
The effects of malware, cyberattacks, and other malicious actions on the various computer networks we encounter daily are a part of the new normal. The Kansas judicial branch's systems were taken offline after one such incident on Oct. 12, 2023. National hospital groups experienced outages during that same time as did several insurance companies, dozens of credit unions, multiple retailers, and other yet undisclosed victims of state actors and organized crime. This situation will not change any time soon for a variety of technical, economic, and political reasons. Consequently, competent practice requires a recognition of that fact and preparation for the ramifications.
When the Kansas eCourt system went offline, we were grateful to have retained copies of our old spreadsheets documenting the unique vagaries of paper filing in all affected jurisdictions. We had built those documents after decades of experience with a wildly disunified court system that could not standardize even on how a petition, summons, and check should be stapled. We were ready to rise to the challenge and push forward representing our clients. We would be hampered by a variety of new challenges.
Post-Paper Court System
One of the first revelations was that post-pandemic turnover in the courts had left many counties without any clerks and few judges with paper filing experience. They trained on and worked exclusively with electronic filing, document imaging, and electronic case management and calendaring systems. Losing access to all those tools simultaneously and indefinitely was, understandably, a huge shock to the system — even if you had experience with the former paper-based processes.
The spreadsheets we and others had compiled under paper filing simply did not translate to the current situation. The courts were revising everything on the fly. One day you would file a document with three copies, and it would be accepted, but the same approach the next day would see the pleadings returned. Sometimes the public was told that certain pleadings could not be filed during the outage or that payments would not be accepted. Figuring out how to navigate the unified court system during a network outage turns out to be a bigger problem than being prepared as a...
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