‘Paperless’ Courthouse to Set High-Tech Standard

Within a beige modular building across the street from the County Jail in Santa Ana lies what officials are hailing as the most technologically advanced courtroom in the state and the future battleground for the county’s most complicated and time-consuming lawsuits.

Working over the last two years with a special state grant, architects have created a paperless courthouse where lawyers display exhibits with PowerPoint presentations and dissect witnesses with video playback. Trial transcripts are instantly transmitted from the court reporter’s hands to television monitors.

Where once lawyers and court officials struggled with boxes of documents and bulky projectors, such paperwork will now be reduced to discs that can be slipped into an attorney’s laptop computer and displayed instantly to a jury on wide-screen monitors.

The five-courtroom facility was designed to deal with so-called complex civil cases--lawsuits that involve numerous parties, storerooms of evidence, armies of lawyers and years of courtroom time. Throughout the state, such cases have sapped the resources of already burdened courthouses, and the judiciary is scrambling to cope with the growth in complex cases.

Court officials say that the Santa Ana facility is viewed as the model for future courtrooms. “We’re looking at a number of ways of dealing with the situation and technology like this is one of them,” said Lynn Holton, a spokeswoman for the Judicial Council of California. “Courts are having a huge challenge keeping up with their regular workload as it is.”

Workers are still putting the finishing touches on the Santa Ana facility, which will open in early August. During a tour of the new Civil Complex Center on Friday, officials said the gadgetry and special design would help speed cases along 20% faster than traditional courtrooms.

“Everybody is very excited about these new courtrooms,” said Orange County Superior Court Judge William F. McDonald. “The lawyers are just champing at the bit to get in here.”

Among the features that will speed cases along are computer displays and devices that allow lawyers and witnesses to draw and illustrate over exhibits.

The judge’s bench and chambers are also wired into the computer video system, so that jurists can flip a kill switch from the bench if something should not be seen by the jury.

Other features include larger courtrooms that can accommodate up to 60 lawyers, panic buttons that alert sheriff’s deputies to problems and Kevlar-lined judge’s benches.

The nondescript, one-story court facility on Flower Street was once home to federal courtrooms, but it has been vacant for two years. The building was taken over by Orange County Superior Court, and the county and the court have paid $2.25 million for the refurbishment.

One of the reasons the cost has been kept modest, officials said, is that a private company installed the courtroom technology and charged the courts nothing. Instead, lawyers participating in the cases will pay the firm, Doar, $550 a day to rent the equipment.

In traditional courtrooms, countless evidence boxes and looping power cords for television monitors created safety hazards. Indeed, McDonald said that in one complex litigation case, there were so many boxes of evidence that the building supervisor worried that the floor might collapse.

“We’re getting rid of much of the clutter and junk that just isn’t safe,” said McDonald, who has supervised the work at the center.