- 260 of Michigan’s 302 trial courts are now live on the JIS unified case management system — up from 243 in FY2023.
- The $150M one-time build was appropriated. The $38M/year in maintenance has been denied every year since 2023.
- 12 additional FTE positions were requested in FY2026 and denied. SCAO warns this will slow expansion and make the system unsustainable.
- A new Judicial Data Lakehouse is replacing the legacy data warehouse — the technical foundation for statewide judicial analytics.
- 60+ probate courts are scheduled to migrate in 2026, the largest single-year cohort since the project began.
The Judicial Information Services Case Management System — Michigan’s unified statewide platform for trial court operations, filings, scheduling, and data reporting across all 302 courts.
SCAO requested $38 million per year in ongoing maintenance alongside the $150M build approval in 2022. That annual funding has been consistently denied or underfunded by the Legislature every year since.
A degraded or under-resourced judicial data infrastructure means delayed cases, inaccessible records, and a system that can’t be audited for performance failures or patterns of harm.
The new analytics platform replacing the legacy Judicial Data Warehouse. Designed for cross-court reporting, policy analysis, and statewide data governance — the foundation for meaningful judicial performance monitoring.
Michigan’s Court Tech Overhaul Has a Quiet Funding Crisis
Michigan’s court case management system has been quietly building toward something pretty significant: a unified, statewide case management system designed to bring all 302 trial courts onto one platform. As of late February 2026, 260 of those courts are live. The system is working. The implementation pace is accelerating.
And the Legislature is being warned — politely, but directly — that the money to maintain what’s being built isn’t there.
The State Court Administrative Office’s (SCAO) Judicial Information Services Legislative Update, released March 1, 2026, reads like two documents at once: a progress report, and a quiet distress signal.
The Build Is Real. The Funding Is Not.
In 2022, all three branches of state government aligned behind a $150 million one-time appropriation to build out the technology infrastructure for a statewide case management system. What came alongside that request — and was not approved — was $38 million in annual ongoing maintenance funding.
That request was denied in FY2023. It has been denied, in whole or in part, every year since.
The 2026 report doesn’t soften it: SCAO has returned to the Legislature each year asking for maintenance funding, and those requests have been “consistently underfunded, leaving SCAO without the necessary resources to maintain the system once fully built.”
“Expansion without maintenance would become unsustainable.” — SCAO JIS Legislative Update, March 2026
This is a structural accountability problem, not an IT problem. Like a hospital expansion without new staff or supply budgets — opening the wings doesn’t work if you can’t operate them.
The Staffing Gap
In FY2025, SCAO received authorization and filled five new full-time positions to support expansion. In FY2026, they requested twelve more. Those were denied. The consequence is explicit: failure to authorize these positions will result in slowed expansion, and the positions are necessary to maintain the larger system long-term. In the meantime, JIS is using contract resources to fill capacity — a more expensive and less stable approach.
Who Just Came Online
Ten courts migrated between March 2025 and February 2026 — up from six in the prior year-and-a-half period. The geographic concentration in rural northern Michigan is notable: these are courts with limited local IT capacity and significant dependence on state infrastructure.
“JIS staff have the patience of a saint, are competent, knowledgeable, an incredible resource and truly help what is a very complicated and stressful situation become much more tolerable.” — Court staff feedback, quoted in the 2026 JIS Legislative Update
The project timeline tells the story of a system learning how to scale:
What’s Actually Being Built
Judicial Data Lakehouse
Development began September 2024. The new analytics platform replaces the legacy Judicial Data Warehouse and is designed for scalable cross-court reporting, policy analysis, and statewide data governance — with compliance and privacy frameworks already in place.
Automatic Hearing Scheduling
JIS is building automated scheduling for high-volume dockets, tied to court rules, judge availability, and case workflow triggers. Paired with expanded electronic notifications — which will eventually eliminate most physical court mail — this represents a material change in how Michigan courts manage their operational calendars.
MiFILE Criminal Case Expansion + Probate Migration
The statewide e-filing platform is expanding to support criminal case types. Over 60 probate courts will migrate to the modern CMS in 2026 — unlocking their MiFILE eligibility for the first time. This is the largest single-year cohort migration planned since the project started.
This infrastructure is the foundation for judicial accountability, too.
The Judicial Data Lakehouse isn’t just an operations tool. A statewide, standardized, analytics-capable case management infrastructure is exactly what makes confidential judicial fitness monitoring — the framework proposed in the FitBench Act — operationally feasible at scale. The plumbing is being built right now. The Legislature that keeps underfunding maintenance should be asked whether it’s paying attention to either goal.
The Accountability Ledger
| What Was Promised | Current Status |
|---|---|
| $150M to build the system | ✅ Appropriated and in use |
| $38M/yr to maintain it | ❌ Denied every year since 2023 |
| 12 FTEs for FY2026 operations | ❌ Denied; using contractors instead |
| Statewide unified CMS by end of project | ⏳ 260/302 courts — 42 remaining |
| Governance framework for CMS | ✅ Judicial Information Advisory Council chartered Q1 2026 |
What the Legislature Should Be Asked
Michigan is three years into a project that received broad bipartisan support and a historic capital investment. The technical execution, by the evidence in this report, is going reasonably well. Courts are migrating faster than before. The platform is maturing. Staff are performing under tight resource constraints.
What isn’t going well is the funding structure for what comes after the build. The $150 million constructs the system. The $38 million per year — consistently denied — is what keeps it running, secure, and capable of serving the public it was designed to reach.
That gap is a legislative choice. And as SCAO’s own report makes clear, it will have operational consequences when the system reaches full scale: slowed expansion, unsustainable maintenance, and a judicial technology infrastructure built correctly but starved of what it needs to survive.
Courts run on data. If Michigan lets this infrastructure degrade after it’s built, the costs won’t show up in a press release. They’ll show up in delayed cases, inaccessible records, and a system that can’t be held accountable — because the data to hold it accountable was never properly funded to exist.
SCAO is asking politely. The question is whether the Legislature is listening.
State Court Administrative Office, Judicial Information Services Legislative Update, March 1, 2026. Full PDF →
Michigan Judicial Council, 2022–25 Strategic Agenda, April 13, 2022.
National Center for State Courts, JIS CMS Feasibility Assessment, March 2023.
Trial Court Funding Commission, Final Report, September 6, 2019.
