Tyler Technologies, the Texas company that built North Carolina's eCourts digital court-records system, has agreed to pay up to $1.5 million to settle a federal class-action lawsuit brought by residents who say the system got them arrested on warrants that were no longer active, or kept them in jail hours and days after they should have been released, according to court documents filed on Monday, October 26. Potentially hundreds of North Carolinians could receive payments under the deal, which still needs a federal judge's approval.

Source: The Assembly NC

The human face of the case is Kevin Spruill of Raleigh. Officers arrested Spruill three times in 2023, each time telling him he had an outstanding arrest warrant. All three arrests were for the same warrant, he said, and it was no longer active because it had already been served. It did not matter: the warrant was still listed in eWarrants, the statewide online warrant repository that is part of eCourts, and each time it took Spruill hours to convince officers that the system was wrong.

“You can't make up for the loss,” Spruill said of the settlement, “but there's light at the end of the tunnel.” He is now putting the experience behind him, but he told The Assembly he still worries he could be arrested on an invalid warrant again, so he keeps his paperwork on him at all times: “I have my documents in order because the system can apparently fail us.”

Who can claim, and what happens next

The agreement covers two groups of people, according to the settlement documents reported by The Assembly: people who were wrongfully arrested, and people who were detained for more than six hours after they had satisfied the conditions for their release. Individual claims are capped at $5,000. Counting attorney fees and other costs, the settlement's total value could reach $2.14 million.

Because this is a class action, the deal is not final yet. A federal judge must first grant preliminary approval. Notices will then be published in local newspapers, class members will have a period of time to submit claims, and the judge will consider final approval after a hearing. Only then will payments go out.

“This settlement represents a meaningful outcome for North Carolinians who lost their liberty during the transition to eCourts,” Gagan Gupta, one of the plaintiffs' attorneys, said in a statement. “We are proud of what our clients have achieved. With this landmark settlement, people across North Carolina can now be compensated for their injuries without having to file a lawsuit on their own.”

Tyler Technologies, for its part, has not admitted doing anything wrong. The settlement does not acknowledge that the company did anything erroneous, and its officials have previously denied any wrongdoing in court filings. A Tyler spokesperson did not immediately respond to The Assembly's inquiry about the settlement.

How North Carolina got here: a $100 million fix for a paper system

North Carolina's courts ran on paper for decades. As early as 1996, court officials said the courts were “at least 10–15 years behind in the use of information technology,” and little changed for two decades. In September 2015, then state Supreme Court Chief Justice Mark Martin convened a commission to modernise the system, and in early March 2018 the North Carolina Administrative Office of the Courts (NCAOC) worked with the National Center for State Courts to draft a request for proposals for an integrated case-management system.

Seven vendors bid. A state vendor-selection committee recommended Tyler Technologies — but it also told state officials to investigate litigation claims against the company involving allegations of wrongful arrests and detentions before signing. Graham Wilson, communications director for the North Carolina Judicial Branch, told The Assembly in 2023 that Tyler disclosed the pending litigation during bidding; the NCAOC has not answered questions about what steps it took to investigate those claims before awarding the contract.

In 2019, interim AOC director McKinley Wood signed a $100 million, 10-year contract with Tyler for a package including Odyssey, its case-management system for filings and records, and eWarrants. The launch, expected in July 2021, slipped as digitising decades of paper records and tailoring the software took longer than projected. eCourts finally went live on February 13, 2023, in four pilot counties — Lee, Wake, Harnett and Johnston — and complaints began almost immediately, with lawyers saying simple steps such as securing bonds had become legal knots. When the system completed its statewide expansion to all 100 counties, AOC Director Ryan Boyce called it a “significant milestone” for a product promoted as one that would “revolutionize our courts system.”

The lawsuit: ‘forged ahead without any failsafe’

The federal class action was filed in May 2023 in the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of North Carolina, about three months after the pilot launch. The plaintiffs alleged they were arrested on invalid warrants or held in jail hours or days after they should have been released; many said the burden fell on them to prove their warrants were inactive, and some said they were arrested multiple times on the same warrant. One of the first plaintiffs, Timia Chaplin, said an eCourts glitch caused her rearrest on Wake County charges that had been dismissed nearly a month earlier. In earlier class-certification filings reported by Law360, plaintiffs alleged that release orders for 179 warrants in the system had been inadvertently deleted — an allegation, not a court finding.

Source: Law360

“Over the last decade, similar software implementations by [Tyler Technologies] led to well-documented cases of overdetention, wrongful arrest, and the like,” the complaint alleged. “Defendants were aware that the same thing could happen here. But they forged ahead without any failsafe or alternative in place.” The NCAOC was initially a defendant but was voluntarily dismissed; its lawyers denied the lawsuit's allegations, and court officials have maintained that the conversion problems were mostly minor hiccups consistent with a major technology upgrade.

The warnings from inside the system were loud. Snags in March 2023 forced Harnett County officials to close many district courtrooms for a week. In 2024, the state Conference of District Attorneys asked the NCAOC to pause the rollout to more counties, and Mecklenburg County District Attorney Spencer Merriweather told the Joint Legislative Oversight Committee on Justice and Public Safety that “grave challenges remain.” A year later, Representative Paul Scott, a Cleveland County Republican, told the same committee that the number of cases his district could handle had “gone down drastically” after eCourts: “We just had grand jury last month, and it took three weeks to input all the indictments.”

It was not Tyler's first such case. A class action in Shelby County, Tennessee, alleged that the transition to the same Odyssey system led to wrongful arrests and long jail detentions there; that lawsuit was settled in 2021 for about $5 million. The costs in North Carolina have also kept growing: in December 2023 the NCAOC extended Tyler's contract for five years with options for extra support services, and the News & Observer reported last year that total state spending on eCourts through 2034 could top $188.8 million.

Why this matters beyond North Carolina

A warrant database is only as good as its accuracy, and this case shows what happens when it is wrong: the error does not stay on a screen — it follows a person into a traffic stop, a roadside check or a knock on the door, anywhere in the state. Truck drivers, delivery workers, new immigrants and anyone else whose work or life puts them in regular contact with police have the most to lose from a stale warrant record, because they are the people most likely to be checked against it. Spruill's own precaution — carrying his court paperwork everywhere — is the practical lesson of the case until the claims process opens.

The settlement closes the case against Tyler, but not the whole legal fight: the lawsuit is still pending against Mecklenburg County Sheriff Garry McFadden, who was added as a defendant when eCourts expanded into his county. The next step is the judge's preliminary-approval decision; after that, published notices will tell affected North Carolinians how and by when to file a claim, with payments capped at $5,000 each.