The following excerpt is from an article by Andrew Brown, written for the Charleston Gazette – and posted May 4, 2015 at govtech.com.
…Since 2013, West Virginia Supreme Court employee Matt Arrowood has been assigned to move the state’s antiquated county court system toward its digital future, where paper copies are a 20th-century notion and lawsuits can be filed with a click of a mouse.
Even as he has suffered through the long drives from courthouse to courthouse, the dark, dank basements of old jails and the company of the snake that took up residence in some of the court records he was saving, Arrowood has successfully moved the state’s 55 county courts one step closer to the computerized era.
In less than two years, Arrowood has brought every county in the state up to speed on scanning and digitally saving new court records, and within the past four months, he’s overseen the adoption of the state’s first e-filing systems in two counties, where lawyers can file motions directly from their computers to the state’s electronic system.
The transformational effort is the result of a recent push by the West Virginia Supreme Court, led by Justice Brent Benjamin, to digitally save and archive all of the state’s court records, starting with present cases but eventually going back over 150 years of legal history…
