Judiciary e-filing system crashes

Several litigants have been forced to re-upload documents into the Judiciary’s e-filing after the system failed to process their payments.

The hiccup, experienced between September 3 and 4, is said to have thrown parties racing to file responses in a bid to beat deadlines in disarray.

“An invoice was generated but when the client attempted to make payments, M-Pesa returned an error that the ‘organisation receiving payment is unavailable’, hence no funds deducted and no payment was processed,” reads part of the notice issued by the Judiciary.

The Judiciary’s Information and Communication Technology directorate has since called on parties affected to re-upload the documents and have the system assess the same to obtain new invoices.

The system is in operation in 60 court stations across the country and is expected to be introduced to the remaining 72 by next month.

Introducing the e-filing system on July 1, Chief Justice David Maraga said it had been designed and developed by the Judiciary’s ICT directorate to impact on speed, accuracy and efficiency of service delivery.

Yesterday, the Law Society of Kenya President Nelson Havi (pictured) termed the hiccup as sabotage allegedly caused by judicial officers out to get kick-backs from parties filing documents, and not a teething problem as indicated by the Judiciary.

“If it is not sabotage, then it is lack of preparedness by the Judiciary because technical problems keep recurring in using this system. A machine’s margin of error should be zero, but this one is 50 per cent,” he added.

Havi said the Judiciary should work closely with LSK members to improve the e-filing system with an aim of making it user friendly.

On parties whose filing of documents deadline was on September 3 or 4, he said they need to write to the courts that had issued the orders to show that the delay was not on their part.