A lawyer walking into the Beaver County prothonotary's office to file a mortgage foreclosure had better be prepared for a whole new world.

A clerk will take the documents, scan them into the computer system and hand them back, along with a scanning bill for $5 plus $1 a page. That's because the prothonotary's office doesn't take paper anymore, not for mortgage foreclosures and, soon, not for any civil case.

"It's the wave of the future," Prothonotary Nancy Werme said.

Under the new system, lawyers will be able to go online and file civil court documents -- divorces, municipal liens, lawsuits, any noncriminal matter -- without leaving their offices. They will be able to access existing filings with equal ease, even if a judge or another lawyer is looking at them at the same time.

"A lawyer's time is at a premium. If you can file electronically, you can save your client money," said Ambridge lawyer Jim Ross, who helped put the system together as chairman of the civil rules committee for the county bar association.

"If I file something in Butler County, you're talking three hours out of my day to drive up there, file and drive back," he said.

Those advantages have not been lost on others.

In going with mandatory e-filing, as people in the business call it, Beaver County is in line with the federal court system and a number of other states.

Pennsylvania has gone to a statewide system for criminal court information, with criminal dockets available online.

Allegheny County was a leader in e-filing, building and launching an electronic system about six years ago. Lancaster County also accepts electronic files, and several other Eastern Pennsylvania counties are looking into it.

Beaver, however, is the first county in Pennsylvania to mandate it by way of a court order. Allegheny accepts paper filings; Beaver soon will not.

Other counties in the region are looking at the issue, though none are near to going the route Beaver has, or even the route Allegheny has.

"Quite a while ago, our president judge mentioned it," Butler County Prothonotary Glenna Walters said. "Our system right now cannot do it. ...

"We know, down the road, probably years from now, it's going to be that way. We just don't know when."

At this point, she said, her office is working toward getting existing paper files converted into electronic ones so they can be accessed online.

Given the volumes of paper files, it is a huge job.

"We have two scanners working eight hours a day," she said. "That's all they do."

Pam Moonley, office manager at the Westmoreland County prothonotary's office, said computer systems were the stumbling block there, too. The one they have is not capable of handling e-filing.

"We're looking into a new computer system," she said. "We're hoping to be able to do them."

The court order in Beaver County, issued by county President Judge Robert E. Kunselman, applied to mortgage documents first, starting Sept. 25. Judgments by confession and municipal claims must be filed electronically starting Nov. 13. All other civil matters, with the exception of divorce and custody, must be electronic starting Feb. 12, and divorce and custody matters must be electronic by April 2.

"If it's not mandatory, people won't use it," Judge Kunselman said.

Eric Fetter, chief deputy prothonotary in Allegheny County, agreed that was largely true.

When Allegheny launched its system in 2000, he said, "we expected to get hundreds and hundreds of filings. Instead, we were getting two or three a day."

As people got used to the idea, more filings were made electronically, "but it was still only 2 percent or 3 percent." It now has reached about 25 percent, mostly because federal courts require e-filing and people are getting accustomed to it, he said.

A mandate was suggested by Lexis-Nexis, the vendor providing Beaver County's system. "Voluntary projects are generally unsuccessful," said Andy Levy, who worked on Beaver County's system for the Seattle-based information-management firm. "Lawyers are creatures of habit. They're just not going to change the way they practice law if they don't have to."

Lexis-Nexis installed its software and provides its service free for the county, making money by selling accounts to lawyers who want to file in the county.

Mr. Levy said it was a small price to pay, considering the costs of paper filing.

"It's a huge benefit to them," noting that it gives them better control over case management as well as saving time and printing costs.

Those without Lexis-Nexis accounts still can file documents, either from computers in the prothonotary's office or by having documents scanned for a fee.

Mrs. Werme is excited by the ease with which her workers will be able to handle documents. No longer will they be carrying paper documents to the racks of manila file folders. "I told them it will be more like being paralegals, checking signatures and paperwork and making sure everything is done right," she said.

That will ease a crunch in her office caused by a rising volume of filings and a shrinking staff as the county cuts costs.

"The work is still there," she said. "It will just be done differently."

Another benefit for Mrs. Werme is the sudden easing of her space problems. Rolling stacks in the office are filled to the brim with recent files, and 850 boxes of older files are sitting in a former mine the county uses for storage.

All will go away when the system is fully implemented. Judge Kunselman's order is that Mrs. Werme's office "need not maintain any hard copy of any legal paper filed electronically," with certain exceptions mandated by state law.

With electronic documents on file in the courthouse computers and backed up on Lexis-Nexis servers, Judge Kunselman saw no need to keep paper copies and tangle with the storage headaches.

"The storage space the prothonotary's office has for documents is just gone," Judge Kunselman said. And while storing documents in the mine will keep them from deteriorating, it is anything but convenient, and too many people have access to the site to ensure the records are safeguarded.

Eliminating paper copies is something Mr. Fetter would like to see in Allegheny County, which still operates under a rule that most documents have to be printed out and the hard copies saved.

"Our preference in the prothonotary's office would be to not print them," he said, noting that the electronic files have a high level of security, but that a fire in the 1980s wiped out several years' worth of divorce files on paper.

Mr. Levy said Lexis-Nexis had accounts in 26 states and that two, Colorado and Delaware, have gone to mandatory e-filing statewide.

"We have about 1 million cases online," he said, and handle 20 million documents a year. About 80,000 lawyers and other court personnel have Lexis-Nexis accounts.

Ms. Walters said that, if mandatory electronic filing comes to Westmoreland County, she expected some lawyers, especially some of the older ones, to balk. "They're going to have to live with it," she said.

Mr. Ross said he expected some lawyers were unhappy about Beaver County's new system, but that no complaints had come to him.

"I had an attorney tell me once, 'I'm not going to change things unless you tell me to do it,' " Mr. Levy said. "And the next thing out of his mouth was, 'And you should tell me to do it.'

"Making them all do it levels the playing field, and that's what they want."