LegalXML Electronic Court Filing Video and News

Following the recent CTC-2013 Conference the Oasis-OpenLegalXML Electronic Court Filing TC met.  Here are some of the highlights:

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First, TC Co-Chair Jim Cabral presented the Electronic CourtFiling 4 Quick Start video that is now online on YouTube.  This 11 minute video slide show provides a quick overview of the standard.  And “Geek Tip”for my CTB reader friends; I often use the KeepVid online tool to make my own copies of YouTube videos.  See: http://keepvid.com/ 

Second, we heard a progress report on the IJIS Institute “Springboard” initiative for ECF version 4.01.  IJIS Institute describes the Springboard as:

“(A) new IJIS Institute standards-based interoperability program designed to help advance information sharing associated with the justice, public safety and homeland security operational environments. Through this program, the IJIS Institute will work with sponsor organizations to provide a shared resource venue to industry for the evaluation and testing of relevant information sharing and interoperability standards, to include:

• Evaluation of standards by industry through a consensus management process. 
• Testing of standards in an "applied" implementation testing environment. 
• Generation of engineering reports, reference implementations, and other best practice assets. 
• "Certification" of products and implementations through a compliant conformance management process. 
• Stewardship of standards and SBI work products through standards governance partnerships.”

Good progress is being made in development of the test system.  We will be posting results as we receive them.  But courts should also encourage their vendors (as well as their internal systems developers) to take advantage of these tests as they become available to protect themselves from non-standards systems.

And third, work began on the scope on ECF version 5.0.  Some of the areas identified are:

• Conformance with the NIEM 3.0 Standard
• A defined roadmap to conformance with improvements in the Web Services SIP
• Addressing corrections and conformance issues                    
• Updates to the Court Policy section including security roles and group definition
• The possible addition of a Court Scheduling capability to the standard

Because of the major undertaking of both court policy security and court scheduling, it is particularly important that developers of both court case management and e-filing strongly consider joining the LegalXML ECF TC in 2014.  It is going to be an important year in the development of the standard that will likely have a great impact in the development of communicating systems for many years to come.