AUGUSTA — With a planned conversion from paper to electronic record-keeping for all court documents looming and a caseload of unresolved cases, Kennebec County court officials plan to “blitz” their caseload next week.

Superior Court Justice Michaela Murphy anticipates she and another judge will take on as many as 250 cases over five days starting Monday. One judge will likely work the courtroom, hearing cases, motions and other public proceedings, while another judge will meet in chambers with prosecutors and defense attorneys in an effort to strike deals to resolve cases without them all going to trial.

It’s expected to be a scaled-down version of a 2023 blitz at the Capital Judicial Center, which was meant to help get caught up on a backlog of cases that had built up during the COVID-19 pandemic. At that time, several active retired judges were brought in to help.

“We think we’ll have 250 cases to deal with on those days,” Murphy said in court recently while scheduling cases for that week. “We’ll have two judges, and we’ll just do the best we can.”

While a global pandemic drove the 2023 courthouse blitz as the courts sought to get caught up first from being closed down and later being restricted on the number of cases they could take, now something more mundane has prompted the blitz — paperwork.

Court officials are seeking to resolve as many cases as possible to minimize the number of files that need to be converted from paper to digital files.

Starting Feb. 2, courts in Kennebec and Somerset counties will switch from paper to electronic court files. From that point forward files will be kept only in electronic form.

Barbara Cardone, director of legal affairs and public relations for the Maine Judicial Branch, said the judges and prosecutor in Region 4, which encompasses courts in Kennebec and Somerset counties, decided to hold another blitz “to minimize the number of cases that need to be converted from paper files to digital files.”

Cardone said as the state’s courts switch from paper to digital as part of the ongoing conversion to Maine eCourts, judges and prosecutors in other counties may also choose to try to clear as many cases as possible before the switch. But she did not know of any other planned blitzes other than the one planned in Region 4.

Murphy said the Augusta court will be focused on unresolved cases, especially those of defendants who are being held in jail because they couldn’t make bail while awaiting action on their cases.

“We’re worried about them being in custody while we do this electronic hocus pocus,” Murphy said in court recently. .

Augusta attorney Walter McKee, president of the Maine Trial Lawyers Association, said the blitz could be a very helpful tool to address both existing and potential backlogs of cases and could help clear a significant number of cases.

He said the courts remain backed up, particularly with felony criminal cases.

“It remains backed up, though obviously not as bad as it was during the pandemic,” McKee said. “A recent report noted that there are 65% more felony cases pending in the courts statewide compared to 2019 and 19% more misdemeanors. Maine crime rates have not increased at that rate for the past six years so for whatever reason we have too many cases than the system can reasonably handle, and Augusta is really no exception.”

As a defense attorney, McKee said he’s hopeful defendants will get better offers from state prosecutors to settle cases with plea deals .

Maeghan Maloney, district attorney for Kennebec and Somerset counties, said prosecutors will not soften stances and give better deals to defendants.

“The DA’s office is not lowering offers,” Maloney said. “The blitz is a time to discuss cases in greater detail with the court.”

McKee said his firm doesn’t have many cases on the schedule as they’d been able to resolve some cases that might otherwise have been added to the list.

“This is an opportunity to have some real focus on a case, and with a judge’s help, get the case resolved now instead of adding it to what will be a major backlog come February,” he said.

Caseload data shared by Maloney indicates as of Oct. 24, there were 1,945 adult cases pending in Kennebec County, 577 of them felony criminal cases.

Last year in the Region 4 courthouses in Augusta, Waterville and Skowhegan, the caseload was about 11,500 cases. That’s down slightly from the previous year. Caseloads appear to have peaked at 12,792 in 2020, when the pandemic arrived in full force, according to Judicial Branch data.

Last year, in Kennebec County 3,677 cases appeared on the unified criminal docket, down slightly from the previous year, and down substantially from 2020’s 4,344 criminal cases.

Chief Justice Valerie Stanfill said in a news release that the coming conversion of paper to digital court files will bring Maine’s case filing system into the 21st century by converting to electronic case management. She asked for the public’s patience as they move through the conversion, which she hopes will be completed at all trial courts by the end of 2026.