This and That in Court Tech – May 2012

News about E-filing in five states, courtroom tweeting, the NAJIS annual conference, Peoria’s new CMS, and a history of the establishment of West Publishing.

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Pew Charitable Trusts Reports on E-Filing

On April 24, 2012 the Pew Stateline news service posted an interesting article on state court E-filing (and I’m not just saying that because I was quoted).  The article discusses activities in Texas, Arkansas, New Hampshire, Nebraska and Arizona.

Issues in Courtroom Tweeting Examined

The first edition of 2012 for the European Journal of Law and Technology (http://ejlt.org//index ) contains an interesting discussion regarding issues for courts and micro-blogging (tweeting) from the courtroom while hearings and trials are in session.  For more see:

Response to the consultation by the Judicial Office for England and Wales on the Use of Live, Text-Based Forms of Communications from Court for the Purposes of Fair and Accurate Reporting 

NAJIS Announces 30th Annual Conference – October 9-12, 2012

The National Association for Justice Information Systems has announced that their annual conference will be held in Portland, Maine this fall.  For more information see the association’s website: http://www.najis.org/

Peoria County, Illinois Selects New CMS

Via Press Release on May 8, 2012 – Peoria County, Ill., has selected Tyler’s Odyssey® court and jail management system to fully integrate the county’s civil and criminal courts, jail and judicial administrative offices onto a single solution.  Peoria County Administrator Lori Curtis Luther likes the system for its efficiency: “Right now each department with a role in the justice system — Sheriff’s Office, Circuit Clerk, Probation, etc. — works with individualized computer systems, completely independent of each other. If an employee in Court Scheduling needs to check a client’s probation schedule, for example, she would have to call the Probation Department to get that information. Once the new system is operational, the court scheduler will be able to access that information with just the click of a button. This system is long overdue and I am excited to partner with Tyler Technologies on the installation of such a valuable time-saving tool.”

History of West Publishing


An interesting history paper came to our attention titled: How West Law Was Made: The Company, its Products, and its Promotions by Ross E.Davies was posted on the Social Science Research Network website.  The abstract states:

Only in American law is West not primarily a geographical term. When we lawyers think of West we tend to think first of West Publishing Company – the preeminent source of printed law books since before we were born and of electronic law databases in recent years. But despite its importance to the development and dissemination of American law, West itself is a creature most of us do not know much about; we know only its products. That is not our fault, because there is only a little bit of information available, and much of that little bit is hard to find. This Article offers some perspective on the roots of West, the publishing company, and of its primacy (or at least the primacy of its brand) in the consciousness of modern American lawyers.