Technological Order in the Court : Earthquake moves Los Angeles Superior Court to further innovations

As the dust settles from the Northridge earthquake, a number of farsighted public officials, business leaders and ordinary citizens are looking around themselves and imagining new and better ways to do what they have done before. Leaders of the Los Angeles County Superior Court are among the visionaries.

Several of that court’s far-flung facilities were damaged severely in the Jan. 17 quake. The San Fernando courthouse was closed for 10 days and the files at other courthouses, including one in Santa Monica, were inaccessible.

But even before the quake the superior court--the trial court of general jurisdiction for the county--was struggling under a mammoth caseload. About 301,000 cases were filed in the court’s 12 branch courthouses in 1992, the last year for which data is available.

With new case management procedures in recent years, the court made strides, reducing delay particularly in the disposition of civil cases. However, the lack of state-of-the-art communications technology clearly hampers the effort. The court’s enormous size and vast geographic reach have made the cost of comprehensive automation prohibitively high, leaving Los Angeles behind other California courts in some ways. For example, entries to the register of action, the master record of case activity, still must be made manually at the Central Division downtown.

The earthquake has provided the impetus to move court technology into the 21st Century. When officials from the U.S. attorney general’s office called Presiding Judge Robert M. Mallano after the quake to ask what help the court needed to ensure public access, he had an answer: $10 million in federal aid for updated computer software and document imaging capabilities to permit any file to be accessed at any courthouse in the county.

The court already has taken other steps to help litigants and lawyers. Several branches now accept civil, probate and family law filings for any one of the branches, and litigants can now file lawsuits by fax in all branches.

Some good ideas are on the docket. We hope the court’s wishes prevail.