eCertification Catching on Alongside Online Records Access
This past month, Duval County, Florida announced that documents could now be electronically certified into the Official Record. This means that constituents no longer have to go to the courthouse to certify documents like marriage licenses, lien claims, deeds, and mortgages.
County governments have been moving in earnest to eCertification systems since the start of the pandemic. Illinois’ Tazewell County was the first in the state to offer electronically certified marriage licenses back in 2021. While avoiding a trip to the clerk’s office might be nice during busy wedding planning, the real benefit for constituents is being able to get certified copies of the document on-demand, no matter where they live. Hillsborough County, Florida has been offering certified documents online even longer, since early 2020, but overall, it’s a relatively new phenomenon.
The process of county clerks, courts, and recorders moving to electronic solutions has been a slow, but steady one. While individual counties experimenting with technology is nothing new, the COVID-19 pandemic brought the practice to the forefront. Two of the biggest reasons companies and citizens visit a clerk’s office are to record documents or view them. In counties where both of these processes occur in person, things like social distancing requirements created barriers to efficiently completing these everyday activities.
Many industrious counties took advantage of the federal government’s CARES Act, which provided funds to help continue operations during the pandemic. Rather than using this money for payroll or videoconferencing licenses, clerks were able to pay for projects that scanned and digitized their records, making them available to constituents online. While this provides the obvious benefit of allowing people to view records without concerns of office capacity limits or travel time, it provides the added benefit of removing records access from the clerk’s office’s day-to-day responsibilities.
Safely creating increased access to public records is a big part of what we do at Extract; we worked with many counties during the pandemic to automatically redact any personally identifiable information in historical and day-forward records that they posted online. Increased records access can certainly be a boon for counties and their constituents, but we’ve seen many examples where people have unexpectedly found information like their social security number freely available.
If you’re interested in learning how personally identifiable information or any other pieces of sensitive data can be identified and redacted automatically, please take a look at our software or reach out for a personalized demonstration.
