This and That in Court Technology - July 2020

Assateague Island Wild Ponies

We have news about a report on protection order repositories, a drive-up clerk’s office that protects uses and staff, comments on impediments in the application of court and legal technology, the HiiL Charging for Justice report, the NIEM 5.1 beta standard announcement, AI closed captioning systems compared, and fun Zoom and Teams web video meeting backgrounds.

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Protection Order Repositories, Web Portals, and Beyond: Technology Solutions to Increase Access and Enforcement

Our NCSC friends, led by Susan Keilitz, have posted an important report on protection order repositories and the positive impact that they can have.  The “report provides an overview of state protection order repositories and issues that impact transmission of data to the NCIC POF; offers guidance on the basic elements of designing, developing, and improving the quality and security of protection order data exchanges; and highlights state efforts to apply innovative technologies to their protection order systems.” 

 

The project was supported by Grant No. 2016 TA-AX-K054 awarded by the Office on Violence Against Women, U.S. Department of Justice. It is available for download from the NCSC Library eCollection website at https://ncsc.contentdm.oclc.org/digital/collection/tech/id/947

Drive-Up Clerk's Office

Not far from our Assateague island ponies shown above, is a re-purposed bank branch in Virginia Beach, Virginia.  A news story on WAVY television shows how the drive-up teller function can be used to minimize physical contact between court users and staff.  It is a great example of the ingenuity that is being applied during the Covid-19 pandemic.  You can watch the news video report here.

 

Impeding Technology – Legal Culture and Technological Resistance

Our good friend, Judge David Harvey writes about the resistance to technological change by the courts and legal culture in this post.  He notes: 

“This paper is about a collision between the culture and symbolism that accompanies the administration of law and technologies that enable change and a different way of doing things yet are the focus of resistance. I argue that this resistance at its heart is cultural and has little to do with legal doctrine.

The particular technologies that I shall discuss are communications technologies that enable and facilitate remote hearings where the participants need not attend a courthouse for a hearing of their dispute. The resistance is, as I have suggested, cultural and is based upon a number of factors including the way in which the imagination and the image of the Court as a symbol is represented and the role that imagery plays in the perception of the delivery of justice.”

It is a very interesting read.  

HiiL Charging for Justice Report

We heard from our friends at The Hague Institute for Innovation of Law (www.hiil.org) regarding their “SDG16 Trend Report, Charging for Justice.  It reveals steps to deliver people-centred justice in a way it becomes a thriving sector of the economy, contributing to GDP and employment. Instead of being a cost or burden on society.

The result of our investigation suggests there are ways to free up the resources needed to provide equal access to justice for all (UN Sustainable Development Goal Target 16.3). The current way of financing and budgeting in the justice sector is not working. This puts our societies at great risk of injustice, violence and inequality. 

Charging for Justice outlines how to respond to this challenge. The new report presents the business case for how courts, organisations supplying legal services, innovators and ministries can unlock funds for justice.”

The report is available at https://www.hiil.org/projects/charging-for-justice/

NIEM 5.0 Beta 1 is Available for Public Review and Comment

The National Information Exchange Model program announced that “NIEM 5.0 Beta 1 is available for review at  https://niem.github.io/niem-releases

 Major content changes include: 

• Addition of Controlled Unclassified Information (CUI) metadata
• Addition of content from the Generic Statistical Information Model (GSIM) content as a precursor to the upcoming Statistics domain
• Addition of new content from the Public Health Emergency Operations Center (PH-EOC) Minimum Data Set to the Emergency Management domain
• Major updates to the FBI NCIC, NDEx, and UCR code tables
• Simplified release folder layout and the removal of version numbers from file paths
• Updated character encoding (from US-ASCII to UTF-8) and addition of attribute xml:lang to the reference schemas for better international support
• Updated structures and appinfo utility schemas as part of the upcoming Naming and Design Rule (NDR) Specification 5.0 update
• Many harmonization content updates 

 The National Information Exchange Model (NIEM) provides a model framework with rules and guidance designed to develop consistent and well-defined enterprise-level information exchanges. For more than fourteen years, NIEM has successfully supported information communities of interest with a shared need for data interoperability across the public and private sector, both nationally and internationally.

Microsoft Teams and Google Meet Closed Captioning Compared

In an article on TheVerge.com website, a comparison of closed captioning capabilities (using each company’s AI speech to text technology) was done.  It is an interesting article and one that, as we in courts are interested in all manner of “the record”, you might try testing yourself?

Zoom and Teams Backgrounds

Last, and for fun, Techrepublic.com posted a library of virtual backgrounds that can be used with Zoom and Microsoft Teams.  I of course like the ones from the computer museum.  Enjoy!