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State court administrator outlines e-filing timeline, warns remote public access will take years
Summary
Alisa Butler told the Joint Judiciary Committee that Wyoming has consolidated trial courts onto Full Court Enterprise and that statewide e-filing began in 2020; she estimated remote document access would take two to three years to implement and flagged vendor, security and policy questions.
Alisa Butler, state court administrator for the Wyoming Judicial Branch, told the Joint Judiciary Committee on May 13 that the branch has been building enterprise case‑management and e‑filing systems for more than two decades and expects the circuit‑court portion of its e‑filing rollout to finish in early 2027. Butler summarized the history of the Judicial Systems Automation fee enacted in 2000 to fund statewide case‑management and e‑filing work and said trial courts now operate on a common case‑management platform called Full Court Enterprise.
Butler said the branch does not develop major systems in‑house because it employs 17 IT staff (eight application developers and nine infrastructure specialists) and instead uses vendor contracts and RFPs for enterprise systems. She described a shift to cloud‑hosted, software‑as‑a‑service deployments that require continuous vendor updates and noted that these arrangements tend to raise ongoing subscription costs compared with one‑time server installs.
On remote public access, Butler estimated that if the branch began work before the end of the year it would take roughly two to three years to implement remote document access statewide. She emphasized unresolved policy questions about what kinds of documents and which data elements should be available remotely and urged deliberation to protect sensitive information. Butler said the current e‑filing platform is hosted by the vendor in the cloud but that judicial branch systems are protected behind a branch firewall and subject to annual cybersecurity audits, logging and monitoring.
Committee members asked whether the branch’s systems include functionality to flag pleadings prepared or fabricated by artificial intelligence. Butler said the current system has no prescreening capability for AI‑produced material and she had not yet seen vendor solutions that do this; she suggested vendors may be exploring such tools.
The presentation concluded with Butler offering to answer further questions and noting that the branch will return for more discussion during the afternoon session on related automation projects and policy issues.
