This and That in Court Technology - January, 2016

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In this month's news we have items from Australia, Indiana, Minnesota, the US Government Accountability Office, the FiveThirtyEight.com statistical analysis website, China, and the Consumer Electronics Show.

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South Australia Issues ECMS RFP

The South Australian Courts Administration Authority (CAA) issued a Request For Proposal (CAA038678) on Monday 11 January 2016 for an Electronic Court Management System. Responses are due by Friday 26 February 2016 at 4pm (South Australian time).

The RFP is available at: https://tenders.sa.gov.au

USA State Courts E-Filing News

Via press release on December 9, 2015:

Indiana Courts foresee major reduction in paper as all three appellate courts accept e-filings.
“All appellate courts will accept electronically filed documents in January 2016. The Indiana Supreme Court and Court of Appeals recently began accepting e-filings, and the Tax Court will join the initiative in January 2016. Chief Justice Loretta Rush announced the implementation of e-filing in all appellate courts by signing the order for Tax Court e-filing. The order can be found at http://courts.in.gov/files/order-other-2015-94S00-1512-MS-676.pdf. Rush called the e-filing project "a modern and efficient approach to handling cases."

“In 2014 the Indiana Supreme Court announced the implementation of statewide e-filing to reduce paper copies, postage, and trips to the clerk's office. With strong support from the legislative and executive branches, attorneys, clerks, judges, and staff, e-filing is underway with plans for statewide implementation by the end of 2018.”

The full press release is available here.

From MPRnews we learned that Minnesota state courts have completed E-filing availability for “all 87 district courts”.  The article further explains that”
“Electronic filing will be considered optional through next June. Self-litigants will retain the paper option after that.

Court personnel and their government partners are working to make electronic filing of citations and criminal charges standard.”

GAO Drafts Report on Offender Tracking System Standard

On November 25, 2015 the US Government Accountability Office publicly released their draft report on standards for offender tracking systems such as GPS ankle bracelets.

The press release web page notes:

"NIJ's draft OTS standard and guide address many common stakeholder needs and challenges. The draft standard includes requirements for common operational and circumvention detection needs. For example, requirements for location accuracy and the ability to provide alerts when an offender tries to remove the device or is at a prohibited location are included in the standard. In addition, the draft guide provides information and guidance related to challenges identified by the criminal justice agencies GAO met with as well as other considerations for implementing an OTS program."

The report also discusses their research and processes used to come to their conclusions.

How to Make Sense of Conflicting, Confusing and Misleading Crime Statistics

The FiveThirtyEight statistical analysis website commented on crime statistics in a post made on January 8, 2015.  They wrote:

"Crime statistics often are confusing, misleading and incomplete — and rarely more so than at the start of a new year, when cities start reporting last year’s crime totals. Numbers out this week show a surge in homicides in many cities, adding urgency to the usual early-January headlines, but you should view them with extreme skepticism."

Click here to read the entire article.

China Implementing Enhanced "Case Acceptance Notice" and E-filing programs

We learned from Chinacourt.org that China's implementation of a new unified court system includes a new case numbering standard.  It is structured in the following manner:

Region + provinces (municipalities) referred + interval + random generated number code

And with this they are producing a new "case acceptance notice" with information for electronically accessing the case with passwords, and 2-D bar coding that allows parties use a mobile phone scanning app.

We also learned that the China Federal Court is implementing an automated case management and electronic filing system.  Their E-filing system uses standard Internet Browser technology for the interface and PDF as the document standard.  They are further requesting that filers use the PDF/A standard when possible.

The project also includes a legal research capability.  They have collected more than 600,000 copies of court opinions.  They report that search of federal judicial opinions generate hundreds of millions of searches each month.

Since these articles are in Chinese language you can use Google Translate to convert them to the language of your choice.

8K Screens Coming Later This Year

Just when you might have been starting to think about 4K screens for your courtrooms or training classrooms, we learned from this year’s Consumer Electronic Show (CES) that 8K screens are coming soon.

So what does that buy you?  More resolution means that more information can be displayed as long as the screen is large enough.  The most obvious example is side-by-side document comparison.

But the announcements also led to criticism from Consumer Reports.