Berks County Civil Court Records: From Outage to CourtPro

Update, November 1, 2026: The new system is live. The Prothonotary's page now announces "the Launch of Paperless Solutions, Inc. CourtPro E-Filing," with a CourtPro Viewer for dockets at berkspa.courtpro.us/prothy, and the office's fee bill for the new system took effect September 28, 2026. The old search at prothy.countyofberks.com no longer loads. Two cautions: the county says every user must register an account, and the Berks County Law Journal has not published its weekly Appearance Docket since its October 8 issue because, it says, county staff lost access to docket information in the switch, with no timeline for a fix. Details are at the end of this report; our court records guide has the how-to. The original report follows as published.

If you need to look up a civil court case in Berks County online right now, a lien on a property, a divorce filing, a lawsuit, you can't. The county's online civil docket search has been unavailable since the middle of June. The Prothonotary's office now plans to replace it with a new system in mid-September, after the launch slipped again from an earlier August 3 target. Until then, the only way to search a civil record is in person at the courthouse in Reading.

The outage covers civil records only. Criminal dockets, which run through a separate statewide system, are not affected, and attorneys can still file cases electronically for day-to-day court business.

What broke, and what's replacing it

Spotlight PA reporter Hanna Holthaus reported on July 15 that the public site went down and that Prothonotary Jonathan Del Collo does not know why it crashed. According to that reporting, the problem was identified June 16, and the office issued no public notice telling residents the system was out.

The site that failed is more than a decade old and was built in-house by the county's IT department. Del Collo is moving the office to a cloud-based platform run by an outside company, Paperless Solutions, which already runs prothonotary systems in other Pennsylvania counties. Per Spotlight PA, the switch is not expected to cost the office extra: e-filing revenue that used to pay for maintaining the old system will instead pay the vendor.

Mid-September is the fourth target. Spotlight PA reported the new system was first set to launch April 1, then July 1, then August 3, slipping each time. In a July 22 update, Del Collo said the latest delay comes from logistical issues: training everyone who uses the system (the Prothonotary's office, the courts, judges, attorneys, and the public), ongoing data conversion and migration, and a few items on the vendor's end. Chief Operating Officer Kevin Barnhardt told Spotlight PA that most software rollouts have fluid go-live dates.

How to look up a civil record until then

You have to go in person. The Prothonotary keeps public terminals at its office in the courthouse.

1. Go to the Prothonotary's Office, Berks County Courthouse, 2nd floor, 633 Court St., Reading.
2. Office hours are Monday through Friday, 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. The office is closed on federal holidays, Good Friday, Election Day, and the day after Thanksgiving.
3. Ask the counter staff for help searching the civil docket. Bring a name or case number if you have one.
4. Call ahead at 610-478-6970 if you are not sure the record you need is a civil one.

As of this writing, the county's own Prothonotary page still lists the online docket search as if it were working and carries no notice about the outage.

What the Prothonotary handles

The Prothonotary is the elected row officer who serves as the chief clerk and record keeper for civil cases in the county. That covers a lot of everyday paperwork: lawsuits, family court and divorce filings, judgments, and the tax liens and municipal liens that get attached to a property when taxes or bills go unpaid. If you are researching a property before a purchase, chasing down a judgment, or tracing a delinquent-tax claim before a tax sale, the civil docket is where those records live. For how the row offices fit into county government, see our guide to how Berks County government works, and for looking up a parcel by owner or address, see how to search Berks County property records.

What to watch

1. Whether the mid-September launch holds. The date has moved three times already.
2. Whether the new site restores the full record. A vendor migration is only as good as the data that transfers; watch for gaps in older cases once it goes live.
3. Public notice. The office did not tell the public the old system was down. Whether it announces the new one, and any further delay, is worth watching.

Update, November 1, 2026: what launched, and what broke

The county's Prothonotary page now carries the vendor's launch announcement in place of the old docket-search link. It offers three things: CourtPro E-Filing for attorneys and other filers, the CourtPro Viewer, labeled "FKA Docket Search," and a 10-page registration guide from Paperless Solutions dated September 24, 2026. The page states no launch date; the office's fee bill for the new system is dated effective September 28, 2026, two weeks past the mid-September target, and adds a card-processing fee of 3 percent or $1, whichever is more. The page still carries no notice about the summer outage.

On access, the announcement reads: "ALL USERS WILL NEED TO REGISTER IN COURTPRO." The registration guide describes accounts for attorneys and self-represented parties with a verified email address, and says the same username serves e-filing and the Viewer. The Viewer itself sits behind a Cloudflare bot check. Neither document describes a no-login public search or states a fee for viewing a docket online, so whether a resident can still check a lien or a judgment for free, as they could on the old site, is not something the county has put in writing.

The one public report of a problem comes from the Berks County Law Journal, the weekly legal newspaper that prints a list of the court's new civil filings. Its October 8 issue was the last to carry that list, the Appearance Docket, covering the week ending September 25. A notice that has run since October 15 says the journal "learned on Oct. 6 that dockets were unavailable for publication" because county personnel "no longer have access to this information due to the launch of the Prothonotary's new e-filing system," that Del Collo told the journal on October 9 his office is working with Paperless Solutions to resolve it, and that "no timeline has been provided." The Appearance Docket is suspended "until further notice." No local outlet has reported on the launch or the docket gap as of this update.

The three questions this report raised in July stand as follows: the launch landed on a fifth date, September 28, rather than mid-September, the date the county's page announced in late September before it was reworded and the date its new fee bill took effect; whether the full historical record migrated is unknown, and the Law Journal's loss of access is the only outside signal, a negative one; and the office's announcement carries no date and still says nothing about the outage. We will update this report if the county publishes viewing fees or public-access terms, or when the Law Journal regains access.