News

Judges, DAs, clerks, bar pan state's eCourts portal

By RAY GRONBERG, NC Tribune, Published: December 12, 2025

North Carolina’s new eCourts system remains a pain point for courthouse staff in many counties, not to mention the state legislators who represent them.

But Administrative Office of the Courts Director Ryan Boyce told a joint legislative oversight committee on Thursday that there’s hope on the horizon for those waiting for improvements. 

“Kind of like your iPhone, this software updates pretty regularly, “ he said. “The next large update is scheduled for the middle of 2026 for a new version update. I have not seen what’s in it, but I have heard it has kind of a more modern feel, and it takes care of a lot of the little issues.”

Another update in the middle of 2026 targets the system’s search function, he said.

The present one, called Portal, “works … but it is a little clunky,” Boyce said.

The news yielded caution reactions from the members of the Joint Legislative Oversight Committee on Public Safety, several of whom say they’re still getting an earful from court clerks and lawyers in their districts.

Sen. Buck Newton, R-Wayne, said in his area, “everybody that’s a player in the system — magistrates, DAs, clerks — all say they’re drowning” as they adapt to the new system. “Magistrates kind of say, ‘Well, I’m doing the job the clerks used to do. DAs say, ‘I’m doing the job the clerks used to do.' Private lawyers say, ‘I’m doing the job the clerks used to do.’ And the clerks all tell me, ‘We’re drowning, we need more help.’”

Rep. Reece Pyrtle, R-Rockingham and a former police chief, said clerks there have told him the system is “more [of] a labor-intensive initiative,” at least in the beginning.

Rep. Paul Scott, R-Rutherford, said the software has reduced the throughput of the court system in his region.

“The amount of cases we can handle in court has gone down drastically,” he said. “We just had grand jury last month, and it took three weeks to input all the indictments.”

Boyce acknowledged that the system “is slower than it needs to be,” and said AOC has docked Texas-based contractor Tyler Technologies because of that to prod the company to make improvements.

But behind that, “there certainly is a learning curve” for everyone involved that’s making courthouses do business in new ways, he said.

“It’s completely changed every single workflow we’ve had for hundreds of years, so that’s a big part of it,” Boyce said.

The eCourts system, which went live in Henderson County in July 2024, replaced an antiquated, mainframe-based system that functioned mainly as an index to paper records kept in each county’s clerk of court’s office. 

Its replacement is cloud-based, and like the federal courts’ PACER network allows files to be accessed from anywhere. 

But it doesn’t work exactly like PACER, and Boyce acknowledged that it’s missing PACER features like email notifications to lawyers when there’s a new filing in their cases.

As “somebody who’s married to an attorney who uses that, I understand how valuable a tool that is, and that’s something we're working with the vendor really hard to get rolled out,” Boyce said.

The state contract for the base system envisioned paying Tyler — an S&P 500 company that netted $263 million in calendar 2024 — $85 million over 10 years. It says it provides statewide case-management software to 14 states. The system was online in all 100 North Carolina counties as of Oct. 13, AOC says.