Monday, March 14, 2016

In the Matter of the George and Jane Jetson Family Case No. 20??-0000-DM

The Jetsons


The Michigan Bar Journal has given the CTB permission to republish an entertaining but I believe prescient article by the President of the Michigan Bar Association, President Lori A. Buiteweg.




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It begins…

“My weekday morning routine went fine. I got up at 5:30 a.m., ran three miles on the treadmill, got ready for work, woke the children at 7:00, gave them breakfast, and put them on the bus at 7:40. The sunrise here in the Upper Peninsula was beautiful. I walked 200 feet to my home office, took my black robe off the hook on the back of my door, put it on, shut the door, and logged into my secure portal.

My intern, a 3L from Detroit, has deposited 12 draft orders—one for each case on my docket this morning—into the portal per the instructions I left her two days ago. Her time logs show it took her two hours to draft the orders. She used the court system’s document info-merge to streamline the process. Attorneys and self-represented parties must input essential information into the portal’s intake form at the start of the case or they won’t be able to electronically file documents on the case.

They are expected to update information whenever it changes; each time they log in to their portal, they are reminded to do so. That information automatically populates draft orders, judgments, and other court documents.”

The rest of the article is available here to view online in PDF form (start at the top of the second column).

It is good to see a prominent leading attorney “gets it” regarding where we are going in court technology.  In fact I would say that many courts already have many of the systems envisioned in the article.  But what I particularly like about it is the vision of an integrated system that can do it all.

From my vantage point, we aren’t all that far away from putting this all together.

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Note: some of our younger and/or international friends may not know about the “Jetsons”.  Click here for the Wikipedia article on one of my favorite television cartoons.


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