It happened on April 13th when the office processed 455 electronic case files.  Harris County District Clerk Loren Jackson says electronic filing has a number of benefits. The most important is access.

“The one thing that we’re looking to do here in the District Clerk’s office is from the time a case is filed, to have that case filing available online for public consumption within 24 hours, that’s our goal.”

Electronic filing also eliminates a lot of paper and that benefits more than the environment.

“It also helps streamline the efficiency in the district clerk’s office as well, simply because the amount of time it takes to process an electronic file is far less then the amount of time to maintain the paper.”

There is no mandate to file civil documents electronically in Harris County as there is in Travis County, but Jackson says things are moving in that direction.  He says he first wants to make sure all judges are on board.

“They want to make sure everything is prepared and ready to go on our end, and I think at this point , I think it becomes a matter of speaking with all the various judges and working together with to figure out  what their requirements are,  the things that they would like to see happen for their individual courts, and then working out a time table.”

Jackson says all 27 Civil Intake clerks are trained and ready to process all pleading filed electronically in Harris County.