Holiday Greetings from the CTB

Our secret tech poet submits another holiday greeting by updating Good King Wenceslas for our CTB readers.

UK Courts Work to Modernize IT and Services

Thanks to Claudia Johnson, we received news of an important speech by Ms. Natalie Ceeney, Chief Executive of HM Courts and Tribunal Services on modernizing courts and tribunals from the Criminal Justice Management conference.

Register for e-Courts 2016 before the end of 2015 for big savings

Special announcement:

Registration for e-Courts 2016 is open, and if you register by December 31 you will receive the Best Bet pricing of $475—a discount greater than 30 percent over our regular on-site registration rate. Remember, e-Courts 2014 was so popular, we had to close registration early and turn away last-minute guests. So, we’ve increased our conference space by returning e-Courts to the Las Vegas Strip. e-Courts 2016 is being held at the Cosmopolitan of Las Vegas. e-Courts 2016 also is bringing a new perspective to tech-y tools for the court staff and designing its education program for all levels of court professionals—administrators, technologists, judges, and information specialists. Don’t miss out. Register NOW!

McMillan Award 2015 Finalist – Cynthia Marr

L to R: Cynthia Marr, Audrey Jun, and Chris Lundquist

In the third of three articles recognizing McMillan Award finalists, we present Ms. Cynthia Marr, Analytic Support Manager, Pierce County District Court in the State of Washington and their online customer service  improvement program.

Friday, December 11th Online Seminar Announced

CITOC has partnered with NACM for an online internet seminar: Are You Making the Most of Your Court IT Projects?  Everyone is welcome to connect.  More below...

This and That in Court Technology – December, 2015

We talk about saving websites as PDF's, an IT administrative position announcement, another judge reprimanded for social media use, police body cameras infected with a computer virus, LexisNexis acquisition of Lex Machina, and more...

Watson Law

An article about a talk by Ms. Kyla Moran, IBM senior consultant with the Watson Industry Leadership group at a Legal Futures Annual Conference in London, England has me thinking…

An Interview with ProBono.net’s Claudia Johnson

Left to Right: Xander Karsten, Claudia Johnson,
and Liz Keith of Probono.net

One of our good friends in the court/justice technology business, Ms. Claudia Johnson of ProBono.net was recently interviewed.

---

The interview was conducted by Mr. Stanley Ramdhany, a senior at Columbia University majoring in Sociology with a particular interest in the field of law and society.

He writes:

“In the field of public interest work, Claudia Johnson is renowned as one of the first law professionals to address the union between technology and legal aid.  On the topic of how she first entered the field, Claudia stated, “I decided to go to law school at U Penn, and there I fell in love with public interest work, by working with DV victims in Northern Philadelphia. At this point, I was very interested in national origin discrimination and LEP advocacy, so I did my Skadden Fellowship on language access for Medicaid/disabled communities with focus on LEP groups.”  It was there that Claudia first focused on the union of legal services and technology:  “I wanted to have a way to track patterns by health care plan, zip code, and client demographics. So I was looking for a relatable multidimensional database—in 1997. That did not exist in legal services, so we had to build our own.”

Click here for the full in-depth interview (and in my opinion it is a good read to learn about this amazing lady)

An Interview with TestNotice’s John Coggeshall

From time to time we here at the CTB want to make our readers aware of new products and services. In this post we talk with John Coggeshall, Co-Founder of TestNotice that provides notification services for drug and problem solving courts.  The service also has other potential uses.

Tennessee Issues Appellate Court E-Filing RFP

The Tennessee State Courts issued an RFP 15-1001 on November 9, 2015 for an Appellate E-Filing System.

Proposals are due on December 14, 2015 and there are additional deadlines in the request as well.

Tennessee's RFP web page is: https://www.tncourts.gov/programs/rfpsgrants

The full RFP document in Microsoft Word format is available on that web page along with other associated documents.

The web page states:

"The objective of this RFP is to acquire and implement an electronic court filing (e-filing) software solution that satisfies the Tennessee appellate courts’ requirements for a commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) software package or licensed service. The electronic filing system will permit court case participants to use the Internet to file permitted documents in appellate cases.  The system will provide the ability for appellate staff review and approval.  For approved filings, the information and documentation contained in the electronic filing will be populated to the court case management system.  E-mail integration is critical. The initial scope of the e-filing system will include initial and subsequent filings in appellate cases.  In the future, the e-filing system may be expanded to include trial court case filings.  The electronic filing system should have proven capability in appellate and trial courts."

Information Systems Security Primer 2015

A good friend of ours, who is an information security expert, shares their wisdom in this week's CTB post.

McMillan Award 2015 Finalist – Miguel Navarro

In the second of three articles recognizing McMillan Award finalists, we present Miguel Navarro from the ITO Central Office in the Administrative Office of the Courts in Trenton, NJ and his (and Robert Jacobsen’s) CTC-2015 presentation.

This and That in Court Technology – October, 2015

News about CourtHack, a new judge research tool for lawyers, the FBI’s NextGen identification system, online digital record preservation classes, a new high-speed departmental scanner, and just what everyone needs: a “Flux Capacitor” for your car.

New South Wales Australia Announces Online Court Project

Sydney, Australia Opera House
Photo by DAVID ILIFF.
License: CC-BY-SA 3.0

Via press release: Wednesday, 9 September 2015

Access to justice will be faster, easier and cheaper with the pilot of the State’s first Online Court, Attorney General Gabrielle Upton today announced.

The Online Court will initially be used for civil cases in the Local Court General Division and will eliminate the need for legal practitioners to attend pre-trial hearings in court.
Ms Upton said the use of online legal services which will improve access to justice and ensure services meet people’s expectations.

Chip Credit Cards – Has your court made the switch?

New credit card readers are needed by courts starting October 1, 2015 (yes, two weeks ago).  The COSCA/NACM Joint Technology Committee wants to remind you about this requirement.  And, they have a Resource Bulletin that can help you to understand what is happening and what you need to do.

Cloud Data Security and Encryption

Secret decoder ring

Last week I saw an article about Microsoft’s new secure cloud network connection tool for government called ExpressRoute.  So that got me thinking...

CourtHack Info and New Schedule

The dates for CourtHack have had a small adjustment and will now be held on Friday, November 13 and Saturday, November 14, 2015  at the Matheson Courthouse in Salt Lake City, Utah.

For tons of information about the event including registration, the full schedule, rules, prizes, judges, and sponsors go the the excellent courthack.org website.

 

NCSC partners with HackerNest for CourtHack Hackathon

News about CTC and the upcoming NCSC CourtHack competition from Troy Burke at Extract Systems.

This and That in Court Technology – Post CTC, September 2015

In this edition we note CTC-2015, another report of handwritten signature failure, iPhone software changes, the Chief Justice of Tennessee announces technology agenda, Intellidact and Tyler partner, and Ohio Supreme Court provides grants to support local technology initiatives.

Ms. Audrey Jun Receives First McMillan Award

At CTC-2015, Ms. Audrey Jun from Courthouse Libraries BC (see bio below) received the first James E. McMillan Award (McMillan Award) for Innovation in Court Technology for their Clicklaw system.  An extract from her submission is shown below.  A full version of her paper is also available by clicking here.

The 2015 CITOC Innovation Awards

The Court Information Technology Officers Consortium (CITOC), with support from the National Association for Court Management (NACM), and the Conference of State Court Administrators (COSCA) announced the 2015 CITOC Innovation Awards at its annual meeting in Minneapolis, Minnesota on September 21, 2015.  The awards recognized two notable contributions to the judiciary in Technology and Court Business Processes. And the winners are...

CTC-2015 Live Video Streaming Sessions

Since as you may know we will be rather busy next week at the CTC-2015 Conference in Minneapolis, I thought we should share the video streaming schedule at the conference for those of you who won’t be able to attend.

UN Mechanism for International Criminal Tribunals Seeks Consultancy Support

The United Nations Mechanism for International Criminal Tribunals (MICT) is seeking Expressions of Interest (EOI) from qualified vendors for Request for Proposal (RFP) it intends to issue for the provision of consultancy services to configure Records Manager 8 Software to function as a Unified Judicial Database. The vendor will also need to merge 2 separate sets of records into one dataset.

Courts are reinventing for the 21st Century

A guest post by Judge Dawn Kilda, 74th District Court in Bay County, Michigan.on how technology implementation benefits her court.

This and That in Court Technology – September, 2015

This month we have news and notes about a crowdsourcing funding project, advances in artificial intelligence powered speech recognition, criminal case E-filing in Illinois, some comments about the new Apple's iPad Pro and Pencil, a new tiny cheap computer, IBM pitches Watson to trial lawyers, solar windows, and cleaning your gadgets.

No Power? Some Ideas and Strategies to Consider

Morgan County, WV Courthouse Power

I suppose that the 10th Anniversary of Hurricane Katrina has me thinking about strategies for keeping the courthouse open.  In other words…”Plan B”.  And since, as you know, computers don’t work very well without some kind of “juice”, we will discuss aspects of electrical power.

Make Your Home Wi-Fi Work Better

A quick note before the weekend starts.  We received a link from our NCSC IT staff about a short online video by Vox.com on how to improve your home wireless (Wi-Fi) network performance.  It is really good. Check it out on YouTube by clicking here.

Cloud Backup

Former Intel CEO Andy Grove titled his 1999 book “Only the Paranoid Survive” which provides a good motto for thinking about protecting your personal and court data.  One potential solution that we will discuss in this article is backing your data up to “the cloud”.

Small Investment, Large Return Using Text and Mail Reminders

Our NCSC Justice Reform and Government Accountability (JRGA) project funded by USAID in Serbia reported great success using SMS text and mail reminders in the Misdemeanor Courts.

Hamilton County Indiana Leads E-Filing Implementation

Hamilton County Courthouse, Noblesville, IN

They will be the first county in the state to accept electronic court filings.

User Interface Changes – Are They Worth It?

I read a terrific blog post last month regarding the problems that result when websites or computer applications change their user interfaces.  We discuss below.

This and That in Court Technology – August, 2015

Lots of news for a hot and sticky summer week from Pennsylvania, Open Law Labs, Adobe, Washington DC, Arizona, Nebraska, and fun tech toy land.

Upcoming JTC Webinar on eBench and Judicial Tools

The Joint Technology Committee (JTC) of COSCA, NACM and the NCSC will host a webinar on Thursday, August 20, 2015 at 2:00pm EDT.  The topic will be "eBench and Dashboards – Making a Case for Judicial Tools".

Windows 10 – Very good so far, but be careful

I did my first Windows 10 computer upgrade yesterday.  And I learned some things to watch out for.

Legacy Systems, Cost Savings, Yes… But the Risk?

Many courts use very old computer software and hardware systems.  They save a lot of money doing that; but there are dangers that we discuss below.

New York Courts Win 2015 Legaltech Innovation Award

Program Assisting Domestic Violence Victims Winner, Innovative Use of Technology in a Pro Bono Project.

JTC Electronic Court Records Webinar Redux

The Joint Technology Committee (JTC) of COSCA and NACM recently conducted a webinar on "Developing an Electronic Court Records Disposition and Preservation Plan."  Huge demand and technical difficulties encountered the first time around prevented many from connecting to the webinar.  So the JTC is presenting this webinar again this Thursday, July 23, 2015 at 1:00pm EDT.

Highlighting Some CTC-2015 Education Sessions

We share some CTC-2015 sessions that you might consider when attending the upcoming conference. But this article is mainly to show a sample of the outstanding conference content coming this fall in Minneapolis.

CTC 2015 Keynote - The Innovation Imperative

CTC’s keynote speaker will be Mark Britton, Founder and CEO of Avvo, the world's largest community for legal guidance and services. Britton's keynote, which will open CTC 2015 on Tuesday morning, September 22, 2015 will address "The Innovation Imperative." Britton will argue how the justice system can more effectively embrace innovation. Britton will explore how innovation has transformed services in many other industries—medical, transportation, food, and travel—and says it's time for the justice system step up its pace and develop systems that foster innovation. You won't want to miss this inspiring and motivating opening session that will set the tone for three great days of learning and networking.

An early July, 2015 edition of This and That in Court Technology

A summer Iowa corn field

Lots and lots to share including news from Iowa, Texas, Arkansas,  US Federal Court’s OSCAR system, a new records management app, and tips for “mobile warriors”.

Macomb County Clerk and Uber Partner to Deliver Jurors to Courthouse

Via press release, Macomb County, MI (June 30, 2015)

"In Macomb County, a jury summons now comes with a driver, providing on-demand transportation to and from the Courthouse. Macomb County Jurors will receive an Uber code good for a $20 ride each way or $40 round trip to and from the courthouse.  In most cases, the code will cover the full cost of a ride.  The ride must start or end at the Macomb County Circuit Court Building in Mount Clemens, and the cost will depend on the distance from a juror’s home.

Professor Frederic Lederer Honored

Photo courtesy of Stephen Hansen

We were very happy to learn that NCSC/W&M Law School Courtroom 21 project co-founder, Professor Fred Lederer was honored by the Judge Advocates Foundation on May 26 with the Chief Justice John Marshall Lifetime Achievement Award, the Foundation's highest honor. Lederer received the award at a dinner in Arlington, Va., sponsored by the Foundation and the Judge Advocates Association. The Judge Advocates General of all of the armed forces and numerous other present and retired senior officers attended the event.

"We are fortunate that Fred's love of the law and interest in technology have combined to drive the development and implementation of legal technology worldwide," Dunn said.  In addition to transforming the law school's McGlothlin Courtroom into "a laboratory courtroom of the future," she said he "anticipated and helped create many of the innovations in legal technology."

Dunn shared Lederer's wide-ranging endeavors with the audience. In addition to being a "go-to speaker," he has participated in more than 300 international forums. He also has written dozens of articles on legal technology, military law, criminal procedure and evidence. He has trained "generations of law students and practitioners in the use of courtroom technology."  Judges, business executives, and courtroom professionals from around the globe seek out his expertise. "Because of him, Williamsburg is a world legal technology mecca," she said."

The full press release is available here.  Congratulations Fred!

Even More This and That in Court Tech – June, 2015

2,500 year old Babylonian clay tablet

Remember that CTC-2015 is only three months away.  See http://ctc2015.org for more.  This week's post notes the CITOC Innovation Awards nominations, IJIS, PDF, NAJIS conferences, South Africa recognizes E-signatures, Michigan state court videoconferencing, M-Disc, and a funny from Harvard Business Review.

USB Flash Drive Insecurity and Video Evidence

Recently there was a discussion among CITOC members regarding the increasing use of video from a variety of sources in courtrooms (including law enforcement patrol cars and body cameras).  One solution suggested was to have this evidence delivered by USB Flash Drive for replay in the courtroom because the “Stick” could be left with the court for evidence.  This may or may not be a good solution; we discuss below…

This and That in Court Technology – June, 2015

Time for another “This and That” roundup of court technology news.

Rwanda Court Pre-Filing E-Filing System

Chief Justice of Rwanda, Prof. Sam Rugege

Earlier this year I visited the courts in Kigali, Rwanda.  They showed me their E-filing system that I didn’t really understand until now.

Court Case Management Systems Part 17: Dashboards

Dashboards are a “particular means of communication” – Stephen Few

In this part of our ongoing CCMS series we will discuss dashboard functionality.  To do this we will split the discussion into two parts.  In the first part we will discuss court administration/ management dashboards.  And in the second part we will talk about dashboards that may be able to facilitate judicial caseload management.

(Information and Dashboard Design – Second Edition - http://www.perceptualedge.com/library.php )

JTC Webinar on E-Records Disposition and Preservation

The Joint Technology Committee (JTC) of COSCA and NACM will host a webinar on Wednesday, June 24, 2015 at 1:00pm EDT.  The topic will be "Developing an Electronic Court Records Disposition and Preservation Plan."

Vermont Seeks Case Management Systems Information

The Vermont Office of the Court Administrator has issued a Request for Information for a "Next Generation Case Management System".

Case Management Global Summit

My colleague, John Matthias and I will be speaking at the BPM Case Management Global Summit conference at the Ritz-Carlson Hotel in Pentagon City, Virginia (Arlington) on June 22, 2015.  The full conference will run from the 22-24th.

Government employees can attend Days 1 & 2 of the Summit for free! Days 1 & 2 plus an all-day Workshop on Day 3 is only $495. Register using your .gov or other government-based to receive the special rate.

Georgia Supreme Court Committee Issues E-Filing Design RFP'

On May 15, 2015 the Supreme Court of Georgia Statewide Judiciary Civil E-filing Steering Committee has issued a Request for Proposal (RFP)
for an independent statewide review and design recommendation for a single sign-on E-filing portal.

The project is scheduled to start in June, 2015 and be completed prior to August, 2015.

Click here for the full PDF proposal.

Proposals are due by 5:00 PM EDT on Monday, June 1, 2015

Smart Forms – Helping the Self-Represented, Helping the Courts

One of the things that we teach here at the NCSC is that court internet web services need to be oriented to the user’s requirements. And, in turn control how information is presented for adjudication. Smart Forms provide one successful approach to address this need.

This and That in Court Tech - May, 2015

In this months article, a commentary on the ABA Blue Sky Agenda, Texas E-filing rollout data, social media training ordered for a judge, Ravel Law launches federal judge analytics, NIEM 10th anniversary, and a McMillan scholarship reminder for CTC-2015.