St. Louis Circuit Clerk Jane Schweitzer is planning a party.

It will involve a cake, a request to use the formal fifth-floor courtroom in the Mel Carnahan courthouse, invitations with the court seal on it, and a paper shredder. Oh, and possibly a recording of the theme from "2001: A Space Odyssey," which she would like to play as she feeds the first associate civil case filed from the past year through the shredder.

The party, on Jan. 3, marks the first official working day that the state considers an electronic court file as the "original" copy — no paper files are required.

"This is the advent of a whole new era of document management," Schweitzer said. "I never thought that document storage would get my blood going. But it does."

In St. Louis, where the circuit court spends $228,000 a year on its lease to store old files, this is the beginning of an electronic era. This year, it began storing associate civil files electronically as a way to prepare for eventually managing all cases electronically, something St. Charles County moved to in recent months.

There, nobody planned a party — the effort has been going on gradually at work stations and computer monitors. St. Charles County and the Missouri Supreme Court were the first in the state to test electronic filing.

Next in line to convert to e-filing are Missouri's appellate courts. There is no timeline for other circuits in the state, but some, like the court in St. Louis, are doing their own scanning and electronic storage in preparation for getting on the state-managed system.

E-filing in St. Charles County hasn't been without the headaches inherent with learning a new system.

"I don't know that I have realized the substantial time savings," said Presiding Judge Richard Zerr. "All the things I do now, I still do. I do them differently."

Eventually e-filing is expected to save time and money, but the state Supreme Court, which is overseeing the conversion, has given no estimate.

Previously lawsuits and other court filings were brought to the courthouse; a clerk date stamped them, arranged them in a manila folder and added them to the file stacks in cabinets throughout the building. When cases went before a judge, clerks pulled the files, sometimes hundreds for a single docket, placed them in carts and wheeled them to the courtroom.

Now, if a lawyer comes to Zerr's chambers and wants to talk about a case not on the docket, no one has to track down the file. Zerr can pull it up on his computer.

With electronic filing, lawyers log on and file documents any time of day.

Several computer terminals are available at the courthouse for the public to view documents.

Roger Steele, who is in charge of technology services at the courthouse, says the complaint he hears most from lawyers is that they get too much information. Lawyers are notified by email every time an entry or change is made regarding a case, which can sometimes mean multiple emails in one day. Officials are working on options that would reduce those notifications.

In a previous, paper-dominated life, many of those notifications would have been sent by mail. Lawyers and officials are just beginning to realize the saving in time and postage, they say.

Andrew Koor, a lawyer based in O'Fallon, Mo., says he likes the freedom of being able to look up documents online, and he saves time once he's at the courthouse.

"We try not to make special trips to the courthouse filing things. When I go down, I spend less time wandering around the different divisions filing things, which is kind of nice."

St. Charles-based lawyer Eric Boehmer is more of a skeptic; he thinks lawyers should be given a choice on how to file documents.

"I'm more of a hands-on guy," he said. "I like to file stuff at the courthouse when I want to file it. I don't want to come back to the office to e-file stuff."

Boehmer worries about the possibility of a virus wiping out the system, but state court officials say security and privacy precautions are in place.

St. Charles County Prosecuting Attorney Jack Banas is also a bit of a skeptic. In June, Banas dealt with his own in-house crisis when five of the county's 15 computer servers crashed. The prosecutor's office had been saving its own internal documents on the servers, and they lost four months of data that they had to spend time entering back into the system, he said.

"I just feel like it's a great thing to have a paperless system — when it's working. They said the Titanic would never sink, either."

He sees the potential of the e-filing system, but everything has to work correctly first, he said.

Eventually, the prosecuting attorney's system will feed into the statewide system. Until then, Banas is going to look into alternate storage and backup for his office's files.

And if he gets an invitation to Schweitzer's shredding party?

"I won't be there," he said, laughing.