Quezon City eCourt system trial run starts

MANILA, Philippines - Supreme Court (SC) administrator Jose Midas Marquez has ordered Quezon City court employees to conduct a month-long dry run of the electronic court (eCourt) system to evaluate its accuracy, security and integrity.

The eCourt system will be launched next month.

Marquez issued a circular ordering both the trial courts and the offices of the clerks of court to use the eCourt system to “record, docket, process, monitor and report case information in all active cases of the affected courts.”

“The assessment and payment of fees, and the docketing of new cases as well as the assignment of new cases by raffle shall also be done through the eCourt system,” read the circular.

The eCourt system is part of the SC’s Enterprise Informative System Plan for the judiciary.

Quezon City trial courts were chosen as the pilot location for the project.

Last month, Marquez authorized Quezon City courts to suspend hearings, except on urgent matters, to pave the way for the encoding of cases for the eCourt system.

He said majority of trial courts have encoded more than 80 percent of the cases for the system, which seeks to give the public easier access to the cases being heard at the local courts.

During the trial run, the courts are still required to maintain a parallel paper-based recording system involving incoming and outgoing case information. Marquez said this will be discontinued only after the evaluation of the results of the trial run.

The SC administrator noted in his circular that the confidentiality of case information, as decreed in special laws and applicable rules, will be kept at all times.