Class Action Says North Carolina’s Upgrade to ‘eCourts’ Led to Illegal Detentions

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Tyler Technologies and the sheriffs of Wake and Lee Counties in North Carolina face a proposed class action that alleges hundreds of people have been unlawfully detained amid the state court system’s shift from paper to digital. 

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The 22-page lawsuit contends that the rollout of “eCourts” in four North Carolina pilot counties—Wake, Lee, Harnett and Johnston—has come at the expense of some who have spent days or weeks longer than necessary in jail, with others having been arrested “multiple times on the same warrant,” even after the charges have been dismissed, or denied the opportunity to post bond.

The filing says that similar software rollouts by defendant Tyler Technologies over the last decade have led to voluminous cases of “overdetention, wrongful arrest, and the like,” yet the law enforcement defendants—including Wake County Sheriff Willie R. Rowe and Lee County Sheriff Brian Estes—“forged ahead” with the eCourt implementation anyway with no failsafe or alternative to fall back on. 

“[D]efendants knew or should have known that, if implemented without due care, eCourts could lead to unlawful detentions and unlawful arrests, among other violations of North Carolinians’ constitutional and other legal rights,” the complaint alleges. “Nonetheless, Defendants hastily forged ahead with the eCourts roll-out—insisting that attorneys, judges, and court staff utilize the software even as defects were known and should have been known.” 

As the lawsuit tells it, North Carolina’s courts remained stuck in the past “[w]ell into the digital age,” to the extent that, in 1996, the state’s courts were considered “at least 10-15 years behind in the use of information technology.” More than two decades later, the case says, little has changed. 

“The federal courts had long-since implemented digital filing and recordkeeping. But in North Carolina, modernization efforts were piecemeal. And those technologies that were adopted soon ‘aged to the point that the skills required to maintain them ha[d] become scarce.’” 

After the North Carolina Administrative Office of the Courts (NCAOC) announced in March 2018 that the state’s judicial branch would partner with the National Center for State Courts to draft a request for proposal for an integrated case management system (ICMS), vendors began to submit proposals, and the selection committee ultimately recommended that the NCAOC partner with Tyler Technologies to pursue the implementation of an ICMS, the lawsuit relays. However, the committee advised the NCAOC to “investigate certain legal claims against and involving Tyler Technologies before making any binding commitments,” the suit appends. 

In June 2019, the NCAOC and Tyler Technologies inked a $100 million contract for new software applications, a package referred to as “eCourts,” the case continues. After several delays, the lawsuit says, eCourts launched in the four pilot counties, and it “soon became clear that [the software] was besieged by defects.” 

“Between February 13, 2023 and April 21, 2023, NCAOC logged (and reported to Tyler Technologies) more than 573 software application defects. The defects ranged ‘from minor configuration issues to errors within application process that cause significant system latency.’” 

A rollout of eCourts into a fifth pilot county, Mecklenburg County, has been delayed indefinitely until several “high priority defects” are resolved, the suit states, noting that the problems were so significant that Harnett County “suspended nearly all district court proceedings for a week.”

The case says that although the impact of the eCourts defects is still coming into focus, some individuals have, as a result of the problems, spent days or weeks longer in jail than necessary. Others, the suit claims, have been arrested more than once on the same warrant, sometimes even after the charges have been dismissed, while others have been denied an opportunity to post bond due to being in an eCourts pilot county. 

Per the complaint, the harms from the eCourts rollout were foreseeable given that similar problems have cropped up in Ector, Cameron and Lubbock Counties in Texas; Merced and Alameda Counties in California; Shelby County, Tennessee; and Marion County, Indiana. 

The lawsuit looks to cover all individuals in North Carolina who, since February 13, 2023, were unlawfully detained as a result of the defendants’ adoption and implementation of eCourts. 

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