I doubt that $10,000 is anywhere close to the cost of designing the system. $10,000 is not even enough to hire one senior developer for a month. And the designers would have to have domain knowledge of the legal system, which very few web developers have; you'd probably need to hire lawyers as consultants. Plus, the article mentions that different courts and judges have differing requirements, so just figuring out what the system needs to do seems non-trivial.

Also, even if the system could be designed for $10,000, the yearly cost of operating it (hardware costs and personnel) would be significant, since all the data from the various courts would need to be entered daily, and someone would need to verify that the data in the system was complete and accurate. Plus, the system would need to be backed up and have redundancy and disaster recovery plans. You can't afford to shut down the legal system across the entire country because one data center loses power. We're not talking about Twitter here; we're talking about critical national infrastructure.