This and That in Court Tech - April 2012

News from California, New York, Pennsylvania, and notes on web site development with SharePoint and a new draft URN:LEX standard.

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California Stops CCMS Deployment

In a Judicial Council press release on March 27, 2012:

"At a special session today, the Judicial Council voted to stop deployment of the California Court Case Management System (CCMS) as a statewide solution for the case management needs of the trial courts. Instead, the council directed the council’s CCMS Internal Committee, in partnership with the trial courts, to develop timelines and recommendations to the Judicial Council to find other ways to use the CCMS technology and the state’s investment in the software system, as well as develop new strategies to assist courts with failing case management systems."

Click here for the full release.



New York Court Administrators Seek Comment on E-filing Rules Proposal

On April 9, 2012 the State of New York Unified Court System released a memorandum seeking comments on changes to rules that would allow public access to some E-filed documents.

Click here to view (PDF) the description of the proposed amendment.


Pennsylvania Standardizes Paper and E-Records

In a press release on March 30, 2012:

"The Administrative Office of Pennsylvania is taking steps to ensure that the retention of electronic magisterial district court case records be consistent with  the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania’s Record Retention and Disposition Schedule with Guidelines, beginning April 1.  The Supreme Court’s schedule standardized the retention of official court records and generally requires:

• summary case records be retained for three years after final disposition or final payment of all court assessments;
• criminal case records be retained for seven years after final disposition or after the date they were held or waived for Common Pleas court;
• civil and landlord tenant case records be retained for seven years after entry of satisfaction of judgment; final disposition, or if appealed, seven years from the result of the appeal; miscellaneous case records be retained three years after the case was filed in the magisterial district court."  

Lessons Learned in Upgrading a Law Firm Website

Mark Gerow, Director of Application Development and Business Process at the law firm of Fenwick & West shares his experiences in using Microsoft SharePoint as the content management system for their new website (which is quite nice).

Part 1
Part 2


URN:LEX Draft Version 6 - Now with HTTP!

Some of you might remember our earlier CTB article about court document verification discussing possible benefits to the courts if this standard were implemented. Now, a new draft version (6) of the proposed Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) URN:LEX standard has been released and it is growing in sophistication and capabilities.

As noted ..."This document describes a Uniform Resource Name (URN) Namespace Identification (NID) convention as prescribed by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) for identifying, naming, assigning, and managing persistent resources in the legal domain."

Note the term "persistent resources". This is critical for courts to consider as they develop their electronic records plans that support public access and archival retrieval now and especially in the future.

Project lead, Professor Enrico Francesconi  also notes the following new feature in this draft:

"An http-based syntax of the LEX identifier is included (Appendix D) to cope with different requirements in legal information management, as for example the need of having an identifier compliant with the Linked Data principles."

And last, a URN schema handler plug-in for the Firefox browser has been posted.

(Thanks to Rob Richards - for sharing this information)