Explaining Why Court Tech Seemed to Move Slowly in 2020?

 

Recently I heard multiple legal technology writers bemoan the slowness that courts adopt and implement new online and similar services.  I explain why that is, and why it is likely not to get better soon in this post? It is going to be a cold winter.

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I think that everyone can agree that the Covid-19 Pandemic has had an enormous impact on the court’s normal business operations in 2020?  In response, we have seen more rapid adoption of technology in this one year than we have had in most courts in decades.  Zoom and related web conferencing have been adopted by nearly everyone.  And we have also had a great increase in E-filing, online document access, digital audio and video recording, digital evidence, and digital signatures. 

But these new technologies are often separate discreet responses that may not work efficiently together.  And most importantly, may not be effective as court rules and training have not been able to keep pace.  I have received reports that judges and staff members are left to “learn on the job”.

But why are courts so slow to respond?  Many reasons.

First, the typical court budget is made up of more than 85 percent and more by staff/personnel costs.  There is simply no way to cut court budgets without either reducing staff counts or hours.  Therefore, during the “great recession” many courts such as in Connecticut simply had to cut days when they were open.  With the backlog caused by the pandemic one can easily see that this will be a difficult response.

Second, courts are funded by their governments.  This means that budget requests are made a minimum of nine months prior to the beginning of the fiscal year.  Some states even have two-year budget cycles.  This means the court will be requesting funding for perhaps 30 months in the future.  I do not know of many “Nostradamus” court administrators that are out there. 

When an emergency event like the Pandemic hits, the hard truth is that cost of any response simply was not planned or budgeted for by the courts.  There is no reserve budget saved by the courts themselves and the government also realizing both reduced revenue and other emergencies such as PPE, testing, and medical costs they must pay for.

https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/publications/2020/econ/g20-qtax2.pdf

Third, response to the pandemic necessitates a “change in mission” for the court’s IT departments.  Now instead of keeping the servers and e-mail working inside the court, the staff had to support web conferencing and electronic communications with all the external users.  Of course, as there was no additional funding available in many instances, this was again expected to be accomplished with no or very little additional staff resources. 

The triple project management constraints model applies here as shown in this graphic.  Since the scope changed, and there was no additional funding for resources, time expanded so that a reasonable quality result could be achieved.

So, to answer the first question posed at the beginning of this post, time expands because of the scope of work and costs changed.

Again, it is going to be a long, cold winter so please be kind to the court IT workers.  They are doing great work as fast as they can.