Tyler Technologies' Odyssey case management system caused wrongful detentions when courts migrated from legacy systems

When courts replace their aging, often decades-old case management systems, the leading replacement — Tyler Technologies' Odyssey platform — has repeatedly caused wrongful arrests and unlawful detentions due to data migration failures and system defects. In North Carolina, within four days of eCourts launching in Mecklenburg County in October 2023, 66 people were held in jail longer than they should have been because the eWarrants module failed to properly track bond postings and release conditions. In Harnett County, clerks had to suspend operations entirely, shutting down multiple courtrooms because the system made case processing impossible. A federal class action lawsuit was filed alleging due process violations, and the court allowed the case to proceed to discovery. This matters because every hour someone spends wrongfully detained is an hour of lost wages, missed childcare, potential job loss, and psychological harm. People who are detained pretrial — even briefly — are more likely to plead guilty just to get out, regardless of actual guilt. The downstream consequences compound: a guilty plea means a criminal record, which means harder employment, housing, and credit access for years. The constitutional right to liberty is not abstract — it is the difference between a person making it to work on Monday or losing their apartment. This problem persists because courts are locked into a near-monopoly. Tyler Technologies dominates the court case management market, and courts lack the technical expertise to evaluate or negotiate these implementations effectively. The company has faced similar lawsuits over an eleven-year period (2011-2022) in Texas, California, Tennessee, and Indiana — including a $5 million settlement in Shelby County, Tennessee — yet continues winning new contracts because there are so few alternatives. Courts are not software companies; they cannot build their own systems, and the procurement process rewards the vendor with the longest track record, even when that track record includes repeated failures. The result is a cycle where the same vendor keeps getting hired, keeps failing during rollouts, and keeps settling lawsuits — while real people sit in jail cells they should not be in.