I wish to introduce the panel and focus on their contribution to today’s
presentation. As Chief Bankruptcy Judge, I have been the principal representative
of Chambers in connection with the Case Management/Electronic Case Filing
project in our district. Derrick Bolen, who has too many titles to
list, is here today as the Director of the Court’s Information and
Technology Department and the technical architect of the Court’s transition
to CM/ECF. Jeff Kellner is the Chapter 13 Trustee in Dayton and has been
actively involved in preparing the Chapter 13 office for ECF. Monica Kindt,
in addition to her other legal work, is a chapter 7 panel trustee in Cincinnati
who has been filing electronically. John Shuch, in addition to his other
legal work, represents various creditors and has had experience filing electronically. Monica
and John spoke on this subject earlier this year at the Midwest seminar.
You will note that the panel attempts, within available time limits,
to provide a range of experience in the major areas of consumer bankruptcy
practice. I might note that, both nationally and in our district, consumer
bankruptcies are approximately 98% of the Court’s filings.
Although there is understandable concern and uncertainty about Electronic
Case Filing and a recognized desire to learn how to operate in the coming
electronic environment, the bankruptcy court has developed more experienced
teachers, in more appropriate learning circumstances, for that purpose.
The focus of this presentation is to take a step back from the operation
of ECF and consider the preparation necessary to successfully practice
in the ECF environment.
II. PREPARATION
A general understanding of the necessity of, and the differences between,
the Case Management (CM) portion and the Electronic Case Filing (ECF)
portion of the new system being implemented in the bankruptcy court will
aid in preparing your offices for participation.
Although only the Clerk’s Office participates directly in the
CM aspect, some understanding of the role of CM is helpful to an understanding
of the ECF portion, which will require your participation as an attorney.
Recognizing that all analogies contain some weakness, my suggestion
is to consider CM and ECF as part of a single court building. The
CM portion consists of the building’s pilings, foundation and support
structures. Although they are not visible to individuals using the
building, without these solid structural components, there simply would
be no building to use.
Many of you are familiar with the term “BANCAP.” It
was the “automation system” previously used by our Bankruptcy
Court and a number of Bankruptcy Courts throughout the nation. When
you filed your papers, petitions, motions, adversaries, etc., those documents
were indexed and managed by the BANCAP system. BANCAP contained the
court’s statistical information. The Administrative Office for the
United States Courts, which supervises the administrative aspect of all
Bankruptcy Courts, operates, in addition to applicable statutes and rules,
to impose reporting requirements and other requirements on the Bankruptcy
Court. The Court is required to maintain such information, both for your
purposes and for national purposes, which include everything from the
national budget for the federal court system down to the number of personnel
in the Clerk’s Office. Your interest in BANCAP may well have
been limited to determining whether or not a filing was accurately reflected
in the docket. A somewhat simple, but accurate, way to state the significance
of the new CM system, which replaced BANCAP, is to state that without
CM there would be no Bankruptcy Court building for any members of the
bankruptcy community.
To continue the building analogy, ECF is the visible and usable portion
of the building. It is the portion of the building seen by attorneys
and other members of the bankruptcy community. ECF is the doorway, the
hallways, the staircases, etc. ECF is an integrated component of
the total system, but is not operated exclusively by the Clerk’s
Office; rather, it is operated jointly by the Clerk’s Office and
all members of the bankruptcy community.
At the present time, CM/ECF is “live” in fifty-two (52)
bankruptcy courts and an additional twenty-eight (28) courts are in the
process of implementing CM/ECF for a total of eighty (80) out of the ninety
(90) Bankruptcy Courts in the nation. I might add that the Southern
District of Ohio has benefited from the pioneering efforts of Ohio Northern,
the Eastern and Western Districts of Kentucky and the Western District
of Pennsylvania. All of these neighboring courts have been “live”,
in various stages, for several years. I might also add that the District
Court for the Southern District of Ohio has now implemented CM/ECF. The
simple point is that CM/ECF will soon be the only available method for
filing in the federal system.
Let me turn to a brief history of CM/ECF in the Southern District of
Ohio. Although the subject of CM/ECF was discussed for several years
in the mid-90’s, in 1998 members of the Clerk’s Office and
others visited the CM/ECF pilot court in Atlanta, Georgia. Since
1998, our court has worked ceaselessly on the issue of CM/ECF. Members
of the Clerk’s Office, various judges and other court personnel:
made site visits to courts in Cleveland, San Antonio; Louisville, San
Diego and, again, Atlanta, spoke with other Bankruptcy Clerks, Judges
and staff in more than thirty (30) other courts; devoted funds and time
to developing a Bankruptcy Information Technology Department that is second
to none in the nation; implemented enhanced training for all members of
the Clerk’s Office, who have worked, and continue to work, diligently
to obtain new skills; spent countless hours reviewing CM/ECF related materials;
met with representatives of the Administrative Office, including members
of the national technical support group for CM/ECF; considered the merits
of various early deployments of CM/ECF, weighed, and seriously debated,
whether to participate as one of the pilot courts in the early deployment
of CM/ECF; and, after numerous meetings, selected, what the court believes
to be, the best CM/ECF version available and the most appropriate time
to implement CM/ECF, given the current and projected federal budget climate
and available resources.
On April 14, 2003, our court completed a total conversion of all the
separate databases in our district to CM. At that time, our court
was the largest court, with the largest number of databases to ever attempt
such a conversion of all of its existing records. Various representatives
of the Administrative Office, including their technical support staff,
arrived in preparation for the conversion and what was anticipated to
be anything from serious problems to a genuine disaster. The good
news is that the conversion was essentially flawless. You might ask,
“What’s the big deal about the conversion to CM?” To
repeat the building analogy, the significant point for you is the foundation
of the CM/ECF court building in this district is secure. You can
have a high degree of confidence that the bankruptcy court in which you
practice has done an outstanding job in fulfilling its obligations to
provide you with a solid structure for your bankruptcy practice in the
21st Century. This task could obviously not have been accomplished
without the genuinely extraordinary efforts and cooperation of all of
the court’s components and a willingness to have previous parochialisms
and preferences, which had historically developed throughout the district,
yield, and continue to yield, to common procedures.
As most of you know, the court has already received District Court approval
of amended Local Rule 5005-4 and will begin partial implementation of
ECF in January 2004 and complete implementation of ECF in July of 2004. For
some of you who already participate in ECF in one of the neighboring Bankruptcy
Courts, or in other Bankruptcy Courts throughout the nation, there will
be a simple online process to register as a ECF User. You will then receive
a password to file electronically with our court. For all others,
the court is still in the process of determining the best educational
and training procedures and the handouts contain the name of local attorneys,
who with attorneys in Cincinnati and Columbus, have volunteered to help
test the ECF system and the proposed training. The Court is in the process
of testing computer based training modules, online tutorials, hands-on
training sessions at the court and other options, with the goal of making
your participation in ECF as easy as possible. I can assure you that the
court continues to devote its full resources and most serious attention
to every aspect of ECF.
III. SUGGESTIONS
Returning to the focus of this seminar, which is a consideration of
the preparation in your office for ECF, although I am persuaded that the
court has, up to this point, done an excellent job of building the appropriate
structure for your use, as a result of the major differences which exist
between large firms and small firms, technically sophisticated and unsophisticated
users and the countless ways in which law offices function, specific suggestions
concerning law office preparation for ECF are better presented by other
members of the panel.
As referenced earlier, Derrick has included an additional article in
your printed materials discussing generally how to think about IT deployments
in the business context of your law practice and suggesting strategies
for getting the most from your IT investments.
I wish to conclude by asking you to consider these issues:
(1) How is information on paper currently being handled in your office
and who are the people responsible for it?
(2) Will your current system of handling information on paper transfer
to an ECF system and, more importantly, should it transfer so that information
will be handled in the same manner and with the same people responsible
for it?
Obviously, your office does not have five (5) years and the court’s
resources to devote to addressing these issues; however, soon you will
replace paper filing with electronic filing. The paper, which you
now file and serve, and which occupies space in your offices, will become
bits and bytes filed, answered and transferred by clicks from your “send”
key. These initial electronic events will be resident on the hard drives
of your offices’ computers in some folder or file. An obvious question
is - in what folder or file and how will it be designated, accessed and
used by you and others in your office.
The transition from a paper to an electronic filing system requires
consideration of, and provides an opportunity for, serious preparation
in advance of implementation. I suggest that several months of thoughtful
planning, discussion and experimentation might be an appropriate time
period to devote to this major event. Attempting to devote only several
days at the last possible moment will not be adequate and implicates issues
of professional responsibility, if not potentially adverse financial impact.
These brief comments are not intended to introduce elements of worry
into your lives. As all of you who have already filed electronically
know, it is extremely useful. Based on my conversations with attorneys
throughout the country who are involved in electronic filing, it is almost
universally described as a more desirable system than the current paper
filing system.
I recognize that in the early period of implementation, the system will
have its share of bumps and glitches; however, at the risk of making a
prediction that will not come true, it is my considered belief that, similar
to other technology advances that gain wide acceptance, ECF will shortly
become enthusiastically embraced in our district for its comprehensiveness,
cost savings and convenience.
|
