Court’s filing system out of date

Stephen Curran

Wednesday, April 20, 2005 | 8:51 a.m.

The system Clark County courts rely upon to catalogue countless pieces of individual case information is woefully out of date, District Judge Kathy Hardcastle told the Clark County Commission on Tuesday.

The Blackstone and C-Track case management systems, once considered front-runners in the automated technology to store a cache of information about civil, criminal, probate, family and juvenile cases, are now so out of date that near-certain backlogs could be "deadly" for the courts, Hardcastle said.

Costs for reprogramming the system each time a judge retires already saps between $8,000 and $10,000 in county revenues, money that could be saved with upgrade software that would likely change what is now a lengthy transfer process to one finished with a touch of a button, she said.

The chief district judge has spearheaded an effort to begin weighing how much it would cost the county to replace the aging system with more integrated software that would likely consolidate the different types of cases. Once a worthwhile replacement has been found, a plan would go before by county's executive steering committee and could be put before the commission in September, Hardcastle said.

Blackstone has been in place in District Court since the late 1980s but barely provides the public, police and those working inside the court about a third of the functionality of a more up-to-date system. C-Track, which dates back more than a decade, is used by Las Vegas Justice Court.

"It's one of the glaring things we noticed" about the existing system, Hardcastle said. " ... We've got to get this done."

Commissioner Chip Maxfield said an improved system is a needed step in stepping up cooperation between county law enforcement and judicial systems.