Local clerks playing catch up after court system outages
The Washington Court systems returned Monday with occasional outages. However, county clerks, like Grant County Clerk Kimberly Allen and her team, are now playing a game of catch-up because the system has been down since Nov. 1 and every legal document and case from the outage date needs to be placed within the system.
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EPHRATA – Technological troubles with the Washington Superior and District court systems have left county clerks working to catch up on backlogged cases.
The Washington Administrative Office of the Courts announced an issue within the system Nov. 1 which resulted in the systems going down that night and being brought back up the following day. However, the courts were still noticing issues so the systems for all court levels were not working from Nov. 2 through Nov. 17. The systems were brought back up for the courts Nov. 18 with intermittent outages.
Grant County Clerk Kimberly Allen said when systems were brought back up on Monday, they began playing the game of catch-up.
“We had to start at the beginning, but we're working hard to get caught up. But new things are coming in at the same time, so we are working to get everything current,” Allen said.
She said the clerk's office began putting all of the new cases into the system and now they are working on putting all of the documents for each case into the system.
“As far as the actual Superior Court is concerned, all hearings, trials, everything, have been proceeding just like usual,” Allen said. “It's just been the clerk's office that has had to play catch up with all of those documents. We were doing everything while the systems were down. We were doing everything manually to support the Superior Court.”
Allen said she and her staff are all working two hours overtime daily to continue catching up on all of the files. However, on Tuesday night the court system went down again while her team was entering documents. The system began functioning again Wednesday morning but it is unknown at this time how long the random outages will last.
“My analogy is kind of like a duck on water where the court kept smooth sailing over that water, and the clerk's office was underneath the water, paddling like crazy,” Allen said.
Allen said the Administrative Office of the Courts has provided very little information on what caused the outage. However, the courts are functioning almost normally again besides the intermittent issues. The AOC did release a statement saying there was no detected breach of data and there was no result in ransomware, due to the department quickly securing the systems.
“People should see service about the same, just might be a little slower if the systems are slow or if we go down and have to do things manually again,” Allen said.