Pima County administration and court buildings in downtown Tucson.Listen:
Stacks of legal-sized paper and black binders in courtrooms may soon be relics of the past.
The Pima County Superior Court has launched a pilot project to test the eBench, a digital dashboard for judges that consolidates case documents and data onto a single computer screen.
Three judges are testing the new system – one from the criminal bench, one from civil and one from family. The touchscreen monitors have been installed in their courtrooms and will soon be set up in their chambers, too.
Heather Murphy works with the Arizona Supreme Court, which is unrolling the project.
“This is a revolutionary system that will change the way judges manage their cases in a couple of different ways,” she said, noting that judges will no longer have to bring stacks of binders into the courtrooms. The system also enables them to more easily and quickly search entire court records.
Murphy said if the pilot is successful, the system will be made available to judges around the state.
“We actually have judges that are begging for this to be deployed in their courtroom," she said. "Obviously it’s important to test it on a much smaller scale, but this entire system has been built with the intent of rolling it out state-wide.”
Murphy couldn’t say how long the pilot will last our when the system will be installed around the state.
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