The Company That Built eCourts Will Pay North Carolinians for Problems

Officers arrested Raleigh resident Kevin Spruill three times in 2023, telling him he had an outstanding arrest warrant. All three were for the same warrant, he said, and it was no longer active because it had already been served. 

It didn’t matter. It was still listed in eWarrants, part of North Carolina’s new electronic court records system. It took Spruill hours each time to convince law-enforcement officers that the system was wrong. 

Now Spruill is among potentially hundreds of North Carolina residents who will receive payments for such hassles. Tyler Technologies, the company behind eCourts, has agreed to pay up to $1.5 million in a class-action settlement of a federal lawsuit, according to court documents filed Monday. 

Spruill said he has mixed feelings about the settlement. 

“You can’t make up for the loss,” he said, “but there’s light at the end of the tunnel.”

The settlement largely ends a more than three-year legal battle over the state’s historic update of an archaic, paper-based court system with what it hailed as 21st-century technology.

“This settlement represents a meaningful outcome for North Carolinians who lost their liberty during the transition to eCourts,” Gagan Gupta, one of the plaintiffs’ attorneys, in a statement. “We are proud of what our clients have achieved. With this landmark settlement, people across North Carolina can now be compensated for their injuries without having to file a lawsuit on their own.”

Tyler’s settlement does not acknowledge it did anything erroneous, and company officials have previously denied any wrongdoing in court documents. 

But the agreement means that potentially hundreds of North Carolina residents could get compensation if they meet certain criteria under the class action settlement. Its total value, including attorney fees and other costs, could reach $2.14 million, according to the settlement.

Because it is a class-action, a federal judge will need to grant preliminary approval. There are two types of classes in the agreement—people who were wrongfully arrested and people who were detained more than six hours after they satisfied the conditions of their release. All individual claims are capped at $5,000. Notices will then be published in local newspapers and there is a period of time where people can submit claims. A judge would consider final approval after a hearing. 

A Tyler company spokesperson did not immediately respond to The Assembly’s inquiry about the settlement.

A System People Depend On

The quality of the state court record system is vital. People need it when they are dealing with civil disputes, criminal charges, family conflict, juvenile discipline, and more. 

When Tyler Technologies signed a $100 million contract to develop eCourts in 2019, state court officials touted it as a chance to transform North Carolina’s records system into one that is more modern, accessible, and environmentally-friendly. 

When eCourts fully expanded statewide, North Carolina Administrative Office of the Court  Director Ryan Boyce called it a “significant milestone.” 

But within days of launching in Lee, Wake, Harnett, and Johnston counties in early 2023, lawyers complained that the eCourts turned once-simple processes, like securing bonds, into legal knots. 

That May, a federal lawsuit was filed in U.S. District Court in the Middle District of North Carolina. The plaintiffs alleged that they were arrested on invalid warrants or were held in jail hours or days after they should have been released. Many who alleged they were wrongly arrested said they had to prove their arrest warrants were inactive. Some were arrested multiple times, the lawsuit alleged. 

NCAOC was initially named as a defendant, but was voluntarily dismissed. Its lawyers denied the lawsuit’s allegations and have minimized concerns about eCourts over the last three years. 

Long-Needed System Updates

North Carolina’s eCourts digital records system was decades in the making. As early as 1996, court officials said the courts were “at least 10-15 years behind in the use of information technology.” 

Nothing much changed over the next two decades. In September 2015, then state Supreme Court Chief Justice Mark Martin brought together a commission to look at ways to update the archaic, paper-centric method of filing and record-keeping. 

The commission recommended a digital integrated case-management system. In early March 2018, the NCAOC partnered with the National Center for State Courts to draft a request for proposal to develop an integrated case-management system. 

Seven vendors submitted proposals. A state courts vendor selection committee recommended Tyler Technologies, though it told state officials to investigate various litigation claims against the company involving allegations of wrongful arrests and detentions before making a final decision. 

Graham Wilson, communications director for the North Carolina Judicial Branch, told The Assembly in 2023 that Tyler disclosed the pending litigation during the bidding process. The NCAOC has not answered questions about what steps it took to investigate the claims in those lawsuits and news stories before awarding Tyler’s contract. 

Interim AOC director McKinley Wood signed a $100 million, 10-year contract with Tyler Technologies in 2019 to create a software package that included eWarrants and Odyssey, the digital case-management system for court filings and online records. 

eCourts was expected to launch in July 2021. But digitizing decades of paper records took longer than projected. Tailoring Odyssey to the state’s courts and developing eWarrants, an online statewide warrant repository, also set things back, according to NCAOC. 

eCourts officially launched February 13, 2023 in four counties. The complaints started almost immediately and continued as the system slowly rolled out to all 100 counties. 

The federal lawsuit alleged that North Carolina could have seen all of this coming. 

“Over the last decade, similar software implementations by [Tyler Technologies] led to well-documented cases of overdetention, wrongful arrest, and the like,” the complaint said. “Defendants were aware that the same thing could happen here. But they forged ahead without any failsafe or alternative in place.”

Tyler has been involved in at least one prior class-action lawsuit—one in Shelby County, Tennessee. Plaintiffs there alleged that the transition to Odyssey led to wrongful arrests and long jail detentions. That lawsuit was settled in 2021 for $5 million. 

North Carolina court officials have maintained that problems with the conversion were mostly minor hiccups consistent with a major technological upgrade. 

But some people who depend on eCourts loudly disagreed. 

In 2024, the state Conference of District Attorneys asked NCAOC officials to pause expanding eCourts into more counties. Mecklenburg County District Attorney Spencer Merriweather told the Joint Legislative Oversight Committee on Justice and Safety that “grave challenges remain.” 

A year later, Rep. Paul Scott, a Cleveland County Republican, told the same committee that the number of cases his district could handle had “gone down drastically” after eCourts. “We just had grand jury last month, and it took three weeks to input all the indictments,” he said. “Is this just a case of us being new? Is it what everybody else has experienced as it’s gone live, or is this not a case of the speed?”

The costs related to the technology have also increased. In December 2023, NCAOC extended its contract with Tyler Technologies for five years and included options for supplemental support services at additional expense. The News & Observer reported last year that the total state expenditure on eCourts through 2034 could top $188.8 million. 

The lawsuit is still pending against Mecklenburg County Sheriff Garry McFadden, who was added as a defendant when eCourts expanded into his county.

In the meantime, Spruill is putting his past experience with eCourts behind him. But he remains worried that he might get arrested on an invalid warrant again. He keeps necessary paperwork on him at all times. 

“I have my documents in order because the system can apparently fail us,” he said.