The basement of the State Supreme Court in Manhattan

As anyone who’s done jury duty in New York can tell you, the wheels of justice grind slowly here. Who knew the culprit was paperwork?

But as this article by William Glaberson in the New York Times shows, the era of xerox-related inefficiency is on its way out. The state supreme court in lower Manhattan is set to become the first “e-court” in the state. In an effort to do away with the 2 million pieces of paper that are generated for the 80,000 civil cases the court handles every year…

…New York State has for the first time been requiring lawyers in about 6,000 cases dealing with commercial disputes in the Manhattan courthouse to “e-file” their cases over the Internet. Clerks and judges then process the documents from the first gripe, through the spiteful arguments and on to the final rulings, all the while providing full public access — and all, at least theoretically, paperlessly.

Jeffrey Carucci, the first deputy chief clerk of the Manhattan court, told Glaberson that ”We have momentum to really eliminate the paper.”

And then, in what almost seems like a set-up to a great lawyer joke, Glaberson details some of the resistance to e-court:

Mr. Carucci recalled that some lawyers seemed to require persuasion to believe that their computer could actually accomplish the act of filing a document at the courthouse that used to require a personal visit to a scratched counter. He said he explained patiently, “E-filing is not just putting it out into cyberspace; it was actually filing,” in court.

No word on when lawyers, judges, and clerks will be adopting tablets or e-readers to replace computers, but the goal is to rid New York courts of paper within 20 years one way or the other.  As Carucci suggests, that may not be so easy. ”It’s a tremendous cultural change,” he said.