NCSC Releases New Report on Court Privacy Policy

A State Justice Institute supported report, “Best Practices for Court Privacy Policy Formulation” authored by three of our NCSC colleagues, Tom Clarke, Jannet Lewis and Di Graski has just been released.  The report begins:

"As state and local courts progressively convert their business processes from paper to electronic formats, policies around remote electronic access to court case information by the public become ever more important.  COSCA last addressed this issue comprehensively in 2002 with a report authored by Martha Steketee and Alan Carlson that proposed a model policy for public access.  At that time, few courts had implemented electronic filing, so the model policy addressed both manual and electronic access.  In the fifteen years since then, courts have learned a lot about living in an electronic world and providing remote access to their case data and documents.  Consequently, there is a need to update what we know about this topic and revise the model policy."

August 31, 2017 revision -- click here to access the updated paper. 

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Major sections of the report include:

• Summary of Current Policies
• Approach to the Problem
• A Revised Model Policy for Electronic Public to Court Case Records
• The State of the Art for Automated Redaction
• Automated Workflows Using Automated Extraction

The report states in the conclusion section:

“Court electronic public access policies both reflect and illustrate these two trends.  Courts face big challenges in reliably redacting confidential case information and providing safe, open access to the public, but the ability to do so will pay off in other ways that will greatly help the courts do a good job overall.  That obviously creates both opportunities and issues.  As courts implement useful new capabilities, other courts will want to take note and leverage what is learned in a timely way to move forward as quickly as possible. The Florida courts have done a good job of taking a more unified approach to their access rules.  See http://www.flcourts.org/resources-and-services/court-technology/technology-standards.stml (“Standards for Access to Electronic Court Records” and “Access Security Matrix”).

It is strongly recommended that all courts download and study the full report.  It is available for viewing and download here (NOTE: AUGUST, 18, 2017, A REVISED PAPER IS BEING WRITTEN AND WILL BE POSTED HERE SOON).