LegalXML Electronic Court Filing 5.0 Standard Approved

OASIS is pleased to announce that Electronic Court Filing Version 5.0 (ECF) from the OASIS LegalXML Electronic Court Filing Technical Committee [1] has been approved as an OASIS Committee Specification.  (ed note: the committee has been working on this for years BTW.)

ECF defines a technical architecture and a set of components, operations and message structures for an electronic court filing system, and sets forth rules governing its implementation. Version 5.0 provides a number of enhancements including:

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• Support for scheduling of court hearings using WS-Calendar
• Limited electronic service of process to process servers and registered agents
• New Document Stamp and operations support retrieval of case information required for stamping
• New Court Policy MDE to better support electronic filing systems with multiple FilingReview MDEs
• Support for cancellation of filings
• Conformance with the 4.0 version of the National Information Exchange Model (NIEM), a national standard for information sharing, new NIEM domains including Biometrics and Human Services
• Conformance with the NIEM Code Lists specification version 1.0 and the representation of all ECF code lists in Genericode format
• Conformance with the 2.2 version of the Universal Business Language (UBL)
• Better management of extensions through NIEM augmentations
• Deprecated content references (e.g. referring to related entities with common identifiers) in favor or element references (e.g. referring to related elements with structures:ref attributes) as described in Reference Rules
• Clarifications and improvements throughout the specification based on feedback from implementers of the ECF 4.0 and 4.01 specifications.

Version 5.0 does not assume that prior versions will be deprecated. However, it is not backward-compatible and applications using the ECF 3.0, 3.01 and 3.1, 4.0 and 4.01 specifications will not interoperate successfully with applications using this version.

This Committee Specification is an OASIS deliverable, completed and approved by the TC and fully ready for testing and implementation.

The prose specifications and related files are available here:

Electronic Court Filing Version 5.0
Committee Specification 01 - 18 April 2019

Editable source (Authoritative):

https://docs.oasis-open.org/legalxml-courtfiling/ecf/v5.0/cs01/ecf-v5.0-cs01.docx
HTML:
https://docs.oasis-open.org/legalxml-courtfiling/ecf/v5.0/cs01/ecf-v5.0-cs01.html
PDF:
https://docs.oasis-open.org/legalxml-courtfiling/ecf/v5.0/cs01/ecf-v5.0-cs01.pdf
XML schemas and Genericode code lists:
https://docs.oasis-open.org/legalxml-courtfiling/ecf/v5.0/cs01/schema/
XML example messages:
https://docs.oasis-open.org/legalxml-courtfiling/ecf/v5.0/cs01/examples/
Model and documentation:
https://docs.oasis-open.org/legalxml-courtfiling/ecf/v5.0/cs01/model/
UML model artifacts:
https://docs.oasis-open.org/legalxml-courtfiling/ecf/v5.0/cs01/uml/

Distribution ZIP file

For your convenience, OASIS provides a complete package of the prose specification and related files in a ZIP distribution file. You can download the ZIP file here:
https://docs.oasis-open.org/legalxml-courtfiling/ecf/v5.0/cs01/ecf-v5.0-cs01.zip

Members of the LegalXML Electronic Court Filing TC [1] approved this specification by Special Majority Vote. The specification had been released for public review as required by the TC Process [2]. The vote to approve as a Committee Specification passed [3], and the document is now available online in the OASIS Library as referenced above.

Our congratulations to the TC on achieving this milestone and our thanks to the reviewers who provided feedback on the specification drafts to help improve the quality of the work.

========== Additional references:
[1] OASIS LegalXML Electronic Court Filing TC
https://www.oasis-open.org/committees/legalxml-courtfiling/