I’ve been in and around Pennsylvania courts for a while now. Bar association meetings, county courthouses, conversations with prothonotaries, clerks, commissioners, attorneys — a lot of rooms, a lot of conversations. I’ve watched the e-filing discussion move forward in increments. A county goes live. An attorney tells me it changed how they practice. A prothonotary tells me their office runs differently now. Progress, but gradual. County by county, conversation by conversation.
Something about May 12 felt different.
We hosted a webinar — “What’s Changing in Civil eFiling Across Pennsylvania” — with a mixed room: mostly attorneys, along with a number of prothonotaries and court administrators from across the state. James McNair, our Technology Solutions Advisor, was leading. We had two guest speakers: Mac Brillhart, a litigator at Saxton & Stump who practices across multiple Pennsylvania counties, and Andy Spade, the Prothonotary of Lancaster County, who’s been live with e-filing and hasn’t looked back.
I’ve sat through a lot of these conversations. I expected a good one. What I didn’t expect was to feel that I was watching something shift.
James opened by laying out the statewide picture — where e-filing is live across Pennsylvania, what attorneys are experiencing in those counties, and what the gap looks like for the ones still waiting. Then he brought in the guests.
Mac spoke to what it actually costs to practice civil litigation across multiple Pennsylvania counties without e-filing. Deadlines that run up against courthouse hours. Clients whose timelines don’t pause for clerk schedules. The added mental load of navigating a different filing process in every jurisdiction.
He was describing a professional reality that any PA civil litigator in that room would have recognized immediately. And then he said something that stayed with me: the efficiencies and the urgency are the two things that stick out. Not convenience. Urgency. That’s a different word.
Then James asked Andy a simple question: what would you say to the prothonotaries out there who are listening?
Andy didn’t pause. He said if you’re considering it, go. If you’re not considering it, start looking at it. And then he kept going — through revenue impact, staff efficiency, file accessibility, what to expect from the bench, what to expect from attorneys who are skeptical, how to work with your IT team to make sure you’re covered. Unprompted. Unscripted. A prothonotary telling his peers exactly what he wished he’d known, and exactly why it was worth it.
What struck me wasn’t just what Andy said. It was who he was saying it to. There were prothonotaries in that room. Court administrators. And Andy was talking to them like a peer, not a salesperson. Because he is one.
That’s not something we could have scripted. That’s just what happens when you put the right people in a room.
James has been in conversations with Pennsylvania attorneys about civil filing — and he’s heard the same things come up consistently: the anxiety around deadlines, the uncertainty when something gets rejected, the inefficiency of a process that varies county to county. On the webinar he named four things attorneys tell him matter most — deadline certainty, immediate confirmation, the ability to file from anywhere, and a record that stays searchable for the life of the case.
Civil e-filing is already live across multiple Pennsylvania counties. The attorneys practicing in those counties are filing from their offices, from home, between hearings. When something is rejected, they know immediately and know why. The record is searchable. The deadline is documented the moment the filing is accepted.
That’s not a future state. That’s what’s happening now in the counties that have made the move.
The counties that haven’t aren’t waiting on technology. They’re waiting on the right conversation — between attorneys who know what they need and court officials who are, more often than you might think, already thinking about it.
Andy said something else that morning I keep coming back to. He’d encourage prothonotaries to make e-filing mandatory, not permissive. Not because it’s easier to manage — though it is — but because doing it one way, consistently, is better for everyone. Attorneys included.
That’s not a vendor position. That’s a court official who’s been on both sides of this describing what he actually believes.
Teleosoft provides CountySuite™ Courts to Pennsylvania civil courts and is the largest e-filing vendor in the state — and yes, we have an interest in seeing e-filing expand across Pennsylvania. I won’t pretend otherwise.
But what I watched on May 12 wasn’t a sales conversation. It was attorneys and court officials in the same room, describing the same reality from different angles, and arriving at the same place. That doesn’t happen because a vendor orchestrated it. It happens because the moment is actually here.
If you’re a Pennsylvania attorney who’s been waiting for the right time to raise this with your county court administrators — I’d say the conversation is more likely to land right now than it has before. If you’d like to talk through what that looks like in your county, I’m happy to connect.
John Grove is VP of Sales & Marketing at Teleosoft, the largest e-filing vendor in Pennsylvania. Reach him at john.grove@teleosoft.com or at teleosoft.com.
Attorneys interested in improving filing access and introducing electronic filing within their courthouse are welcome to connect directly with John Grove for a cost-benefit discussion and general readiness assessment.
If you want to explore how e‑filing could work in your county, schedule a 15‑minute consultation.
