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.

	Lake Fong, Post-Gazette Washington County Prothonotary Phyllis Ranko-Matheny looks up a document at her office at Washington County Courthouse. Click photo for larger image.

It is a wave that's not going to be breaking on Washington County any time soon.

While electronic court filing is becoming a reality for counties such as Beaver and Allegheny, Washington County still relies on a paper filing system and no changes are planned for the near future.

Under the new system in Beaver County, 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," said Ambridge lawyer Jim Ross, who helped put the system together as chairman of the civil rules committee for the county bar association. "If you can file electronically, you can save your client money."

He said he routinely handled cases in Allegheny, Butler, Lawrence and Washington counties. "If I file something in Butler County, you're talking three hours out of my day to drive up there, file and drive back."

Those advantages have not been lost on other counties. Allegheny, in fact, was a leader in e-filing, as people in the business call it, building and launching an electronic system about six years ago.

Though other counties have incorporated electronic filing, Beaver is the first one in Pennsylvania to mandate it by way of a court order. Allegheny accepts paper filings; Beaver soon will not.

The order, issued by Beaver 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.

Such technological advances have encountered some resistance in places like Washington County, which rebuffed electronic filing when it first became an option and still isn't considering the leap.

"We don't do anything electronic as far as filing," said Washington County Prothonotary Phyllis Ranko-Matheny.

"It has to be OK'd by the president judge, and they weren't too fond of doing it that way," she said, referring to reactions to the new concept.

Although technology -- and president judges -- have changed over the years, Ms. Ranko-Matheny said the subject hasn't come up recently. She said lawyers and judges prefer "to see the document."

"I have heard no discussion here since it was initially discussed," she said.

Ms. Ranko-Matheny said her staff of 12 files about 9,000 new cases each year, and processes hundreds of thousands of secondary documents for civil cases, divorces, and the like.

The county uses the prothonotary's office in the county courthouse for storage, along with rented space in two other facilities.

"Space is always a problem," Ms. Ranko-Matheny said.

Steven Tkach, Washington County's director of court technology and records management, said there are no plans for technological innovations in the prothonotary's office but, if changes were to be made, the first step would be installing a document managing system that would use imaging to store and scan records.

Such a system already is in use for the county orphan's and criminal court division.

And there have been some technological updates. Debbie O'Dell Seneca, the county's president judge since 2004, recently had cameras and electronic employee identification readers installed in the county courthouse. She also plans to introduce video-conferencing for arraignments, booking and hearings.

Eric Feder, chief deputy prothonotary in Allegheny County, said that, when Allegheny launched its system in 2000, "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, things got a little better, "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."

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, either.

That's something Mr. Feder 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.

Other counties in the region are looking at the issue of electronic filing, though none is 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.

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.

Mr. Ross said he expected there were some lawyers 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."