Finally! e-Filing is Coming to a Courthouse Near You

March 2022 will bring a major, long-overdue change to the Contra Costa County Court system! For many years, our court has relied on four separate legacy case-management systems, based on ancient programming languages from vendors that are no longer in business.

In 2018, we, along with eight other courts led by the Judicial Council, requested state funding to replace the three other systems. In 2019, the Governor approved this funding but required a very quick turnaround to implement the systems – three years!

We began our transition in 2019, starting with the Court’s Traffic system with C-Track from Thomas Reuters. It has been a very successful.

The next step was to replace the other case types (criminal, civil, family, probate, juvenile). We selected Odyssey Case Manager from Tyler Technologies, a software solution being used by 29 of the 58 courts in the state. We assembled a team of subject matter experts to work through the transition of business processes and to configure the system. We began mapping out the transfer of all the data elements from the three legacy systems and transitioning it into Odyssey. This has proven to be a monumental undertaking and has been challenging, but our staff has been up to it. Our IT department worked hard to set up the necessary environment to safely house the case management system and to create a state-of-the-art data center for redundancy of our network.

Thanks to Odyssey, we will finally be able to offer E-filing for civil, family law, DCSS and probate. (A tutorial on the system for court users will be announced in the very near future.) An on-line public portal to access case information will include calendars for judicial departments to confirm court appearances and hearings.

Going Paperless

The court has also embarked on a very aggressive project to go paperless! This is another monumental process that requires scanning and indexing millions of pieces of paper. When we go live in March, all new documents will be scanned as they come into the court.

Another benefit of the Odyssey system is ongoing enhancements as requested and developed by the other 29 courts. Our court will continue to participate in this statewide working group to develop future enhancements.

As communicated recently, court staff is participating in what we call a “Mock Go Live” through February. This is where staff performs each transition in the legacy system, and then performs it in Odyssey. This will give our employees the training and confidence necessary to have a successful transition to the new system on March 28, 2022!

We appreciate your support thus far, and ask that you continue to have patience with the court in total and with our exciting transition!