eCourts’ Continuing Legal Mess

eCourts, North Carolina’s $100 million digital records system, has expanded throughout the state since its launch two years ago, but so have its legal woes. 

On Monday, a judge denied motions to dismiss claims against Tyler Technologies, the Texas-based company that designed eCourts, and Mecklenburg County Sheriff Gary L. McFadden in a federal lawsuit alleging the new system caused people to be wrongly arrested or detained too long. 

The North Carolina Administrative Office of the Courts first rolled out eCourts, a cloud-based integrated case-management system, in Wake, Harnett, Johnston, and Lee counties in February 2023. Almost immediately, lawyers in the pilot counties described it as a nightmare, saying glitches with eCourts and errors in its online records transformed once-simple processes into byzantine mazes that might take hours or even days to get through. 

Those problems, lawyers say, resulted in people getting arrested on inactive warrants or spending additional time in jail even after they had satisfied the conditions of their release. At one point in March 2023, things got so bad that Harnett County closed many of its district courtrooms for a week. 

People who say eCourts caused them to be treated unfairly filed a federal lawsuit in May 2023 against the state court system, state court officials, and sheriffs in the four pilot counties. That suit was amended in February 2024 to include McFadden after eCourts launched in Mecklenburg County. The 13 plaintiffs say defects with eCourts caused them to be either wrongly arrested or detained for days or even weeks after they had posted bond or otherwise satisfied conditions for release. The defendants, including Tyler Technologies, have denied the allegations in court documents and largely argued that human error caused many of the issues outlined in the lawsuit. 

Plaintiffs voluntarily dismissed NCAOC and court officials from the lawsuit after a recent state Supreme Court ruling extended governmental immunity to court clerks, and they also dismissed the claims against Lee County Sheriff Brian Estes. That left three defendants—Tyler Technologies, Wake County Sheriff Willie R. Rowe, and McFadden. In Monday’s ruling, U.S. District Judge William L. Osteen Jr. dismissed claims against Rowe, saying that plaintiffs had not established Rowe’s deputies were liable for serving what turned out to be invalid warrants. But he denied motions to dismiss the claims against Tyler Technologies and McFadden, meaning the lawsuit against them can move forward. 

Osteen concluded that the plaintiffs had plausibly alleged that defects in eCourts resulted in either their wrongful arrest or delayed release from jail and that Tyler Technologies should have foreseen those problems. The plaintiffs’ allegations that McFadden knew or should have known about the problems with eCourts were also plausible, the judge ruled. Osteen said McFadden, in his role as sheriff, is supposed to ensure the timely release of inmates and had acknowledged in interviews that “the wait times are much longer” after Mecklenburg started using eCourts. 

As Osteen noted in his order, within four days after the eCourts launch in Mecklenburg, 66 people had been held in jail longer than they should have been due to problems with eCourts’ online warrant depository, eWarrants, and with Odyssey, its cloud-based integrated case-management system. 

Tyler Technologies said in a statement that it is aware of the lawsuit and doesn’t comment on pending litigation. “We remain committed to the statewide deployment efforts in partnership with our client, the North Carolina Administrative Office of the Courts,” the company said.

McFadden also said he could not comment on pending litigation. 

“We will reserve our right to present our case in court,” he said. “We respect the judge’s ruling, and we will have our day in court.” 

‘Grave Challenges’

eCourts was designed to replace North Carolina courts’ archaic, paper-based records system. It had been years in the making. 

In 2015, the N.C. Supreme Court’s then-Chief Justice Mark Martin asked the Commission on the Administration of Law and Justice , which was created to comprehensively evaluate the judicial system, to review the old system and recommend improvements. The commission said that the state needed to update to an integrated case-management system, described as a “single-source, digital application … used to manage all aspects of court administration.” 

In 2018, the state court system partnered with the National Center for State Courts to draft a request for proposal that would eventually attract bids from seven companies, including Tyler. A vendor selection committee vetted the companies and advised the state court system to “investigate certain claims involving Tyler Technologies before making any binding commitments.” 

Nonetheless, Tyler landed a $100 million, 10-year contract—the largest software-as-a-service deal in the company’s history. 

Those legal claims that the vendor selection committee referenced were plentiful. And they were similar to the ones made in the pending federal lawsuit about wrongful arrests and lengthy detentions in North Carolina. In his order, Osteen noted that in 2011, Merced County, California, had a breakdown in communications between its criminal court and its jail after adopting Odyssey. Three years later, Cameron County, Texas, had problems tracking inmates in its jails after transitioning to Odyssey, which Osteen also noted in his ruling this week. 

In 2016, public defenders in Alameda County, California, discovered dozens of cases in which people had been wrongfully arrested, jailed when they should have been freed, or incorrectly told that they needed to register as sex offenders, after adopting Tyler’s Odyssey system. Osteen also noted that inmates filed a class-action lawsuit against Shelby County, Tennessee, officials, Tyler Technologies, and others, alleging that Odyssey had caused wrongful arrests, over-detentions, and other issues. The lawsuit was settled for nearly $5 million. 

Lubbock County, Texas, officials “admitted that the county’s switch to Odyssey had caused people to be detained longer than necessary,” Osteen’s order said. 

Graham Wilson, communications officer for the North Carolina Judicial Branch, has previously told The Assembly that Tyler disclosed the pending litigation during the bidding process.  

NCAOC officials have said complaints about eCourts were mostly the kinds of hiccups expected in such a massive undertaking. But in the weeks following the launch in the four pilot counties, NCAOC officials logged more than 573 “software application defects,” including what NCAOC director Ryan Boyce described as “high priority defects that must be resolved prior to further expansion.” 

Elizabeth Trosch, then Mecklenburg’s chief district judge, warned about an “integration issue” between eWarrants and Odyssey eight days before eCourts launched in the county in 2023, according to court filings. And Mecklenburg District Attorney Spencer Merriweather complained last year to the Joint Legislative Oversight Committee on Justice and Public Safety that there were still “grave challenges” seven months after the launch, citing problems with redacting sensitive information in domestic and sexual violence cases. 

At that same meeting, the North Carolina Conference of District Attorneys called for eCourts’ expansion to be paused. 

“It does not make good sense to continue to go into counties when there’s this kind of a problem,” Chuck Spahos, the DA conference’s general counsel and legislative liaison, told the committee last year.

But NCAOC has the ultimate say on whether to pump the brakes, and Boyce told the committee stopping the expansion would not be wise. The focus, he said, is in completely ridding the courts of the old systems. 

“These old legacy mainframe systems we’re dealing with are on 1959 technology. Every day we have those systems is more of a risk than our cloud-based systems,” he said.

Sharing Evidence

The litigation has not stopped North Carolina counties from adopting eCourts. It is now used in 62 counties and on April 28 will expand to 11 more. All 100 counties are expected to be on the system by the end of 2025. 

There haven’t been any recent issues publicly aired about the system, although attorneys in Guilford County told Yes! Weekly that eCourts continues to clog up things. 

Gagan Gupta, an attorney for the plaintiffs in the federal lawsuit over eCourts, said in a statement that almost everyone supports modernizing the state’s court system. “But today’s ruling is a powerful reminder that this effort cannot come at the expense of people’s constitutional rights,” he said. 

Osteen’s ruling paves the way for discovery, where the parties share evidence. Osteen also has to rule on certifying the lawsuit as a class action, which would include determining whether there are questions of law and facts that are common to other potential plaintiffs who could be part of the suit. There is no timeline for when Osteen will rule, and there is no trial date.