This story first appeared as an exclusive in the October Orange Rag
Leading Florida defence firm Cole Scott & Kissane has selected automated court filing management vendor ECFX, driven by changes to the court e-filing system in Florida that came into force on 29 October.
Changes to the E-service Notification of Electronic Filing (NEF) mean that PDFs of documents will no longer be sent out by the Court and have been replaced by an emailed link that will expire after seven days. While Court documents that are not downloaded will still be available, lawyers will have to go through a process to obtain and pay for the documents.
CSK has an aggressive timeframe to roll out the SaaS solution and expects it to go live on 8 November, around a month from selection. The ECFX team is currently importing data from Aderant Expert and Total Office. ECFX works by identifying emails that are court filings, notifying the case team and downloading emails to client matter files.
CSK’s CIO Jason Thomas told Legal IT Insider: “Currently our lawyers go and download all of the attachments and manually file them but it’s all automated now or will be automated. Our assistants spend so much time filing emails. It seems that that is the bulk of what they do. So, taking this off their plate will be huge.”
Conversations around automation sometimes lead to nervousness around job losses but Thomas said: “We’ve introduced this type of automation before and if need be, we just move people around. We changed the way we do cash receipts, and we use AI for that, so we repurposed the people in accounts payable.”
He added: “People don’t fear change if you have a culture of looking after them. We just want them to do good work. If there were more firms like that, perhaps people would be more excited about change.”
ECFX offers a per head or per transaction licence and CSK has opted for the latter.
This is the latest innovation from CSK, which in January selected Litify as its legal case management system, in one of the biggest technology investments ever made by the firm. See more on that here: https://legaltechnology.com/2022/01/27/exclusive-cole-scott-and-kissane-selects-litify-for-case-management/