The California Courts Judicial Council recently voted to stop deploying what was meant to be a statewide case management system after the State Auditor determined that the project had been poorly managed. California counties that are currently using the system will continue to do so (Sacramento, Fresno, Orange, Los Angeles, San Diego, Ventura, and San Joaquin) but other counties will wait until issues of funding, logistics, and administration are resolved.
Some law students might be surprised to find that most states don’t provide a PACER-like system for court case management. After all, Federal courts have been using electronic case management for years now and most law students have heard of PACER. But in fact, states and counties have taken multiple approaches to case management due to a variety of factors, not the least of which is cost. In California, the Administrative Office of the Courts and several superior courts had spent $407 million by June 2010 on its statewide case management project, and the State Auditor projected a final cost of over $2 billion by 2015-16.*
* See Cal. State Auditor, Administrative Office of the Courts: The Statewide Case Management Project Faces Significant Challenges Due to Poor Project Management, (Feb. 2011), p. 1.The Auditor’s report is an interesting read, by the way, especially for anybody considering a career that might involve government contracts. The California State Auditor’s website has an archive of its reports, some from as early as 1993, and you can sign up to get an email when there’s a new report released: http://www.bsa.ca.gov/reports/.