On October 13, eCourts, the state’s $100 million digital records system, went live in 13 more counties, bringing the platform to every county in North Carolina.
“Full implementation of the eCourts project is a significant milestone in modernizing the North Carolina court system,” Ryan S. Boyce, director of N.C. Administrative Office of the Courts (NCAOC), said in a statement.
Reaching that milestone was years in the making, and the implementation of eCourts in N.C. hasn’t always been smooth.
NCAOC first launched eCourts in Wake, Harnett, Johnston, and Lee counties on February 13, 2023. Immediately, lawyers in the pilot counties described the system as nightmare-inducing, saying glitches with eCourts and errors in its online system turned once-simple processes into byzantine mazes that could take hours or even days to slog through. At one point, the N.C. Conference of District Attorneys asked that its expansion be paused until the problems could be addressed.
Those issues led to a federal lawsuit, filed in May 2023, alleging that the system caused multiple people to be imprisoned for days or weeks longer than they needed to be, or that they had been arrested on invalid warrants. That lawsuit is still pending, and awaiting a decision from a judge on class-action status. No trial date has been set and a decision about class-action status likely won’t happen until late next year.
U.S. District Judge William L. Osteen Jr. denied motions to dismiss claims against Tyler Technologies and Mecklenburg County Sheriff Garry McFadden on March 31. All the other defendants were dismissed from the lawsuit.
eCourts’ origins trace back to 2015, when the state Supreme Court’s then-Chief Justice Mark Martin asked a commission to review the state’s archaic, paper-based records system and recommend improvements. The state took bids from seven companies, including Tyler Technologies. The vendor selection committee that vetted bids advised NCAOC to “investigate certain claims involving Tyler Technologies before making any binding commitments.”
Among them: reports that in 2011, Merced County, California had a breakdown in communications between its criminal court and its jail after adopting Odyssey, eCourts’ case-management system. Three years later, Cameron County, Texas had trouble tracking inmates after transitioning to Odyssey.
Public defenders in Alameda County, California, also 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 Odyssey. And inmates in Shelby County, Tennessee, filed a class-action lawsuit alleging that Odyssey had caused wrongful arrests and over-detentions that was settled for nearly $5 million.
Graham Wilson, communications director for the North Carolina Judicial Branch, said in a previous interview that Tyler Technologies disclosed the pending litigation during the bidding process. The company still landed the $100 million, 10-year state contract—the largest software-as-a-service deal in the company’s history.
Even as eCourts reached its 100th county this week, there were glitches. The website was either down or slow to load at several points.
Wilson said hiccups are to be expected: “It’s the final go-live week, and there is significant server infrastructure ongoing that may temporarily impact service.”
