This and That in Court Technology – April/Spring 2015 Edition

From a flowering springtime in Williamsburg, Virginia we share our latest news bites from around the court tech world.  In this edition we share news about a CTC scholarship, social media process service, another electronic verification failure, new mobile phone apps for scanning and court check in, a white paper on court technology in 2020, and conference news.

---

McMillan Scholarship and the One Day CTC-2015 Sale is Monday, April 13th

I am pleased to share that the James E. McMillan Award for Innovation in Court Technology will fund an individual to attend the conference.  To see the announcement and competition criteria click here.

And don’t forget to go to ctc2015.org to register for the conference next week!


Judge Allows Facebook to Serve Divorce Papers

In an exclusive article published on April 6, 2015 the New York Daily News described how a Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Matthew Cooper (the Supreme Court in New York is the trial court) came to allow a “Brooklyn woman”, to use Facebook to serve her divorce papers.

The full article is available for viewing here.

And the slip opinion written by Justice Cooper is currently available here:
http://www.courts.state.ny.us/Reporter/3dseries/2015/2015_25096.htm

I have saved a PDF copy here.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B_GkWl6S9MJMU29ENVdRRy0xTzQ/view?usp=sharing


Prisoner in England Escapes Using E-mail

The BBC posted an article on March 27, 2015 describing how a prisoner, Neil Moore, was “on remand when he used an illicit mobile phone to create a fake email account.”  He used that account to pose “as a senior court clerk and sent bail instructions to prison staff, who released him on” March 10, 2014.  He later turned himself in.

Now…now… can we talk about electronic communication validation?  How many examples do we need?


Thomson-Reuters C-Track Team Offers White Paper: The Future of Courts 2020

The paper, available for download after registration here begins:

“We set ourselves the challenge: what will the courts look like in 20 years’ time? 

To provide possible answers to this question, we combined external opinion and internal expert views to create a composite forecast of the likely directions of court technology and procedural development in the coming decades. 

We sought insight from common law jurisdictions in the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia and elsewhere. We were struck both by the variety of progress we saw in modernization, and by the commonality of themes. Across this broad geographic spread, the same questions concern the judge, the court clerk and the legal professional. 

We see converging trends: in digitization, virtualization, and the challenges of a data-driven world.”

To find out what trends and challenges they found we recommend that you download their paper.


Michigan Court Attorney Mobile Check-In

Thanks to our NCSC colleague, Ms. Di Graski, we learned that the 63rd District Court in Grand Rapids Michigan has developed a QR Code enabled responsive web app in partnership with the Michigan Supreme Court, SCAO, and JIS program.  The web app allows attorneys to check-in for court for one or all cases and view the court docket each morning after 6:00 AM all from their cell phone.  The system requires attorneys to register one time to use the system.

Well Done!



Microsoft Mobile Office Lens for iPhone and Android

We have a new favorite mobile phone app here at the NCSC.  The scanning app using your mobile phone’s camera to quickly scan documents, white boards, and other things such as receipts and it automatically centers, focuses and crops it. Then you can e-mail it or save it on your phone for later.

It is very nice.  And as we wrote about earlier, this kind of app helps to solve a problem/e-filing barrier for many court participants.

For more on the app, click here for an article at “mobilesyrup”.


National Association for Justice Information Systems (NAJIS) Annual Conference

The information systems user group for Prosecutors, NAJIS will hold their annual conference October 6-9, 2015 at the Buena Vista Palace Hotel & Spa (sounds nice huh?) in Lake Buena Vista, Florida near Orlando and Disney World.  For more, go to their website: http://www.najis.org/


PDF Association Shares Conference Event Videos Online

And last, in a press release the PDF Association announced:

“Last December a score of PDF experts came together in Washington DC and New York City to discuss PDF technology in a way that makes it approachable for CIOs and others who are interested in what PDF can do for them in terms of business solutions.
PDF Day’s purely educational sessions – the vast majority of the content – were leavened with “5 minutes with a PDF vendor” – a short, snappy introduction to event sponsor’s products and services 

Subjects of the sessions cover a wide variety of interests in PDF technology, from accessibility to transactional documents to digital signatures, collaboration, and more.”

The videos are available on a YouTube site here.