After Six-Week Shutdown, Philly Court's Digital System Back Online
News of the e-filing and docket searches getting back up online spread quickly and led to sighs of relief from many in the legal community.
July 01, 2019 at 05:47 PM
4 minute read
Philadelphia. Photo: Shutterstock
After six weeks with a shuttered digital system, the Philadelphia Court of Common Pleas' electronic filing system was back up and running Monday, with attorneys mostly reporting that the system was running smoothly.
According to a court announcement, the electronic filing systems for the First Judicial District's civil and orphans' courts were restored Monday morning. A source familiar with the court said that “hundreds” of filings had been entered through the e-filing system by Monday afternoon.
The e-filing systems had been shut down since the afternoon of May 21, and without digital access, law firms had to adapt over the last six weeks by scaling back deadlines to match the court's hours of operation, having couriers file documents with court officials in person, and improvising ways to manually print out copies of dockets.
News of the e-filing and docket searches getting back up online spread quickly and led to sighs of relief from many in the legal community.
Mitchell Kaplan, managing shareholder of Zarwin Baum DeVito Kaplan Schaer Toddy, said having the system back up was “a big relief.”
“We had a couple people go on the docket successfully,” Kaplan said. “So far so good from our side.”
Duffy + Fulginiti attorney Kenneth Fulginiti also said attorneys at his firm were starting to receive filings notices and court orders again. Now that the filings don't need to be entered manually by court officials, attorneys seemingly could go back to “business as usual,” Fulginiti said.
“I know we had a big filing due tomorrow, and we were worried, with the old system of walking it over, we had to get it in by 4:30 p.m., but now we have until 11:59 p.m.,” he said.
However, not all attorneys said the system was running as seamlessly.
For one thing, the e-filing system is only compatible with Microsoft 10 Edge, Safari and Firefox, so not being able to use the more popular browsers like Internet Explorer and Google Chrome have created some complications, attorneys said.
Albert Bixler, member-in-charge for Eckert Seamans Cherin & Mellott's Philadelphia office, also said he had some issues accessing documents through embedded links in email notifications.
“They're making progress,” Bixler said. “I think there are still bugs that obviously have to be worked out, but we'll have to make some adjustments internally.”
One pleasant surprise reported by all attorneys was that they did not receive a barrage of backlogged emails from the system notifying them of the past filings. Several attorneys said they had expected to receive hundreds of email notifications for all filings entered in their cases over the past six weeks. Although attorneys said they received notifications from filings entered Monday, they all said the expected deluge never materialized.
“There wan't anything like that,” Jeffrey Goodman of Saltz Mongeluzzi Barrett & Bendesky said. “Hopefully everything's up and running and we can return to the way it was.”
The court and city have offered little information about the intrusion so far, citing security concerns. Although court administrator Joseph Evers initially told The Philadelphia Inquirer on June 21 that the hack appeared to have originated from Russia, that claim was strongly and quickly walked back by court and city officials, including Mark Wheeler, chief information officer for the Kenney administration, who told The Inquirer on June 22 the investigation was still ongoing and the source was “not Russian.”
The Inquirer also reported in late June that the court had hired SoluStaff, which is headquartered in Montgomery County, to fight the cyberattack, and the court further awarded the company an additional $60,000 contract to update its security system.
Regardless of the origin, court officials maintain that no court data was breached in the intrusion.
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