When COVID-19 emerged last year, the Missouri Court Automation Committee was in the middle of trying to replace the outdated Justice Information System without a major disruption in court operations. But due to the magnitude of the coronavirus, the commission was distracted.
“At the same time that we're in the middle of that, COVID-19 comes along and the first thing we have to look at in automation is how do our employees work remotely because everybody wanted to work remotely,” said Southern District Court of Appeals Judge Gary Lynch, chairman of the Missouri Court Automation Committee.
The second issue the Committee was forced to address, according to Judge Lynch, was keeping courts open with remote appearances.
“That started out as a nightmare because we had judges and clerks all across the state that were using whatever tool they could to figure out how to keep communicating,” Lynch told the St. Louis Record.
Microsoft Teams, Google Meet, GoToMeeting, WebEx, and Zoom were among the videoconferencing tools that Lynch discovered his fellow judges were enlisting.
“Not knowing where we were but knowing we had to rein things in a bit, we immediately, approved only Webex and Zoom for public court proceedings,” Lynch said.
Although Zoom is still in use by some judges and courts, the Committee decided to phase out Zoom’s temporary approval.
“We knew a little bit about Webex because the committee had been in the process of evaluating Webex and we did not know a whole lot about Zoom but quite honestly there were some security issues initially about Zoom that caused us some heartburn but people were using it,” Lynch said.
The committee, created after the legislature passed Section 476.055 in 1994, has been charged with developing and implementing a plan for statewide court automation systems ever since.
“We have not only members of the judiciary on our committee but also two members of the House of Representatives, two members of the Senate and the Commissioner of Administration,” he said. “We also have the executive director of the Missouri Office of Prosecution Services and the state public defender on our committee. We are a unique committee in that regard.”
In addition to creating a policy that requires judges and courts to eventually solely use Webex over Zoom, the Committee is also trying to integrate Case.Net with remote hearings.
“Case.Net is where the public can go for information and that comes right from our case management system because that's where we keep our data and you can't necessarily enter information but you can certainly pull public information,” Lynch said. “We're trying to figure ways to make things easier to have remote access on it.”