Friday, January 6, 2012

Maricopa County ICJIS Director Job Announcement

We received the following message yesterday to pass along to our community:

Maricopa County (located in Phoenix, AZ) has an outstanding career opportunity for ICJIS (Integrated Criminal Justice Information System) Director.  The successful candidate will establish and oversee a project management agency to coordinate the planning, development, implementation and maintenance of and ICJIS system for Maricopa County.  Salary range: $101,296 - $157,019/Yr.



Mobile Legal Services


Our good friends at Cornell University Law School Legal Information Institute (via Rob Richards) posted a very interesting article on December 22, 2011 regarding the potential for the use of mobile telephone messaging/SMS for legal services.  The author, Sean Martin McDonald (founder of frontlinesms.com), argues that the ubiquity of mobile telephones provides great potential for many legal services including legal client intake and referral, client and case management.  And I would add training and document verification as other possibilities.

Bridging "the last mile" between the clients and legal services (including courts) are important.  The author concludes the article with the following:
"I don’t think any of this will square me with my property-law professor.  I’m not sure I’ll ever fix property law.  But I do think that by reaching out to new populations using the technologies in their pockets, we can make a difference in the way people interact with the law. And even if that’s just a little bit, even if it just enables one percent more people to protect their homes, start a business, or pursue a better life, isn’t that worth it?"
Hear, hear!

Tuesday, January 3, 2012

Hey US Postal Service - The Courts Need This!


We're all back at work at the NCSC and want to first wish everyone a good and productive 2012.

Over the break we heard of several services offered by the Postal Service in Switzerland that would be extremely useful to the US Courts.

The first service is called IncaMail (PDF document link) that provides secure encrypted e-mail.  An interesting aspect is that "during the initial (first time) registration, both the e-mail address and the physical address of the user are verified by sending an activation code."