We were curious as to the status of online court help to the self-represented litigants as a good 2021 year-end wrapup article for the CTB? We share what we found below.
In addition, we just learned of a new NIJ study on the use of Chatbots in the Criminal Justice System to add to our list of online helpers.
I stumbled across two outstanding articles on how to measure Access to Justice. The first article is a summary posted on Medium.com by Ms. Rachel Wang that analyzes the second by Mr. Hugh McDonald UC Irvine Law Review article titled “Assessing Access to Justice: How Much “Legal” Do People Need and How Can We Know?
In short, why has it taken this long to ask the questions posed in these articles?
Continuing the general theme of earlier CTB articles here, here, and here on using documents as the database for context, analysis, and data entry; we saw an article from Infoworld.com today that lists tools by AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Document AI that “can parse your unstructured documents and produce structured information for all kinds of digital transformation use cases”.
From "not the usual ABA (American Bar Association)" the courts normally hear from, it is good to know that the Bankers are thinking about the criminal justice system. The American Bankers Association share via press release on November 10 2021 their new whitepaper.
 |
| Created by Yu luck, Noun Project |
Just kidding about the Bears. There have been a lot of training and
information sessions posted online lately plus some court pandemic response
training and ODR news. Check it out below.
The Nevada Administrative Office of the Courts (AOC), a judicial branch department that assists the Supreme Court of Nevada with the administration of the Nevada courts, invites submissions of offers for up-to-three AOC-sponsored, integrated, comprehensive, case management system(s) (CMS) and associated implementation services in compliance with the requirements and terms set forth in this RFP.
Please see; https://nvcourts.gov/AOC/Procurements/ for details. Vendors, please monitor the webpage for updates. The deadline for submission of offers is December 13, 2021, at 3:00 PM Pacific Time.
Via press release from the IJIS Institute:
Over the past several years, our society has seen an influx of advanced technology solutions that have made available a tsunami of structured and unstructured data about our lives, our public safety, and our disputes. As a result, law enforcement, prosecutors, defense counsels, the private bar, and the courts are all faced with an abundant amount of data (both relevant and irrelevant) for investigations, discovery, and court cases. The collection of this data ultimately requires a great deal of time and effort by public safety and criminal justice practitioners globally. How should our law enforcement and court communities adapt to this increased demand for the collection, vetting, management, and sharing of digital evidence?
 |
| Fall leaves via https://bit.ly/3vPp959 |
In this months post, we share news and notes from Tiny Chat on Text Messaging, a very nice online forms website from Washington state, news regarding a new US federal judiciary vulnerability policy, news of good work being done by the District Court in Bernalillo County, New Mexico, practical information on PDF file formats from the US Library of Congress, and a last-minute call for participation in the annual Trends in State Courts report.
The Intellectual Property High Court of Japan (IPHC), together with several other legal organizations, annually holds their Judicial Symposium on Intellectual Property (JSIP). This year, JSIP 2021 will be held online from October 20 through 22(JST).
More below…
Continuing with our practical advice October...
Courts create a lot of document files. Some of those files get uploaded, saved, and organized in the court's case management or electronic document management systems. And some courts use tools like SharePoint. But even these tools can benefit from a consistent useful file naming standard. I looked online and found two excellent pages on the subject.
More below…
John Gustafson & Jim McMillan at CTC2021
We are happy to share the winner of the CTC McMillan Scholarship, John Gustafson, Data Quality Manager, First Judicial Circuit of Florida. I was happy to meet John at the conference and learn more about his great work for the court. His award winning submission follows.
Exhibitors and sponsors are a fundamental part of the CTC experience.
There are dozens of booths in the exhibit hall. One can plan your in-person visit with our online exhibit hall map so you don’t miss anything.
Online attendees will be able to reach out to exhibitors via our NCSC app during the conference. It is recommended that you download and install (or update) the app prior to the conference starting on September 28th so you don’t miss anything.
Our sponsors have also prepared some top-tier education
sessions that shouldn’t be missed. The sessions will cover a broad range of subjects,
including virtual solutions, inclusivity, mitigating user expectations,
artificial intelligence, pretrial software, and futureproofing your court.
We’re looking forward to seeing you in Columbus and online!
 |
| https://bit.ly/3luAySV |
As has happened many times in the past I was prompted by the most recent NCSC Tiny Chat on the Hawai’i Online Dispute Resolution system that preparing notes on one’s legal issue in dispute could be useful? That got me to look at what web-based notes applications are available? There are a lot!
September means “back to school” days. Learning for my court tech friends includes CourtStack CMS training, the upcoming LegalXML Electronic Court Filing (ECF) face to face meeting at CTC 2021, planning for new Microsoft Teams capabilities, and Ontario’s new legal innovation regulatory sandbox project.
Registration for livestream access is ready. If you’re
planning to attend CTC 2021 online, now’s the time to sign up. Here’s how it
works.
We recognize that not everyone is able to travel to Columbus, so we’re excited to share that registration for livestream access is ready. If you’re planning to attend CTC 2021 online, now’s the time to sign up.
Here’s how it works.
 |
| Presidio County Courthouse |
Via press release, August 31, 2021 – The Texas Office of
Court Administration (OCA) announced today that it has selected three vendors
to support Texas’ new statewide Uniform Case Management System (UCMS). The
system is an opt-in court case management system aimed at supporting Texas
counties with a population less than 20,000 which equates to over half of the
state’s 254 Counties.
More…
 |
| MaxPixel.net |
Documents are the summer wheat that we make our court case
bread (final product) from. We have two interesting
announcements to share in this week’s post from The Effectiveness Project and
LegalXML LegalRuleML.
Conference staff has been hard at work working out the details of CTC 2021. Those details include getting the schedule organized. Today, we’re pleased to announce the conference schedule has been updated with session and track information.
Click here to see the new schedule.
In this month’s collection of notes we have news about an online forms creation website, punishment for abuse of social media by posting a judge's personal information, ideas for "engineering gatherings", New Mexico finishing their statewide E-filing implementation project, the new NCSC's Courthouse Retrospective report, CCJ/COSCA support for remote and virtual hearings, and a cool new data tool.
Irving Texas work “in recent years to improve its municipal court’s Failure to Appear (FTA) rate shows what is possible when cities invest in foundational data practices and use data-driven evaluations to test and fine-tune new approaches.”
The article posted in Medium.com WhatWorksCity subsite explains why Irving focused on this problem.
The Supreme Court of Appeals of West Virginia is issuing a Request for Proposal (RFP) to acquire an electronic court case management solution comprised of case management, document management, and e-file management systems for the new Intermediate Court of Appeals created in 2021 by the West Virginia Legislature.
The initial focus of the project will be on the new court with the possibility of future expansion to other levels of the West Virginia Judiciary. The deadline for submission is October 1, 2021. Please click on the link provided below to access the West Virginia Judiciary Request for Proposals Webpage.
http://www.courtswv.gov/court-administration/request-for-proposals.html
A couple of weeks ago I shared some of “my problems with pending case statistics”. Before that, I posted another note regarding an alternative for analyzing criminal justice data. I generally try not to complain about things without having a solution in mind. In this article, I will share the idea of using text analytics to work with a court’s largest data source, case documents, and reports.
We’re happy to announce this year’s keynote speaker, Peter Warren Singer. Named one of the nation’s 100 leading innovators by Smithsonian Magazine, Singer is a notable influencer, global thinker, and “mad scientist” by organizations including Defense News, Foreign Policy, and the U.S. Army’s Training and Doctrine Command.
A strategist and senior fellow at the think tank New America, Singer is an award-winning author of novels and non-fiction books about military privatization, robotics, the weaponization of social media, and cyberwar and cybersecurity.
My friends in the NCSC Tiny Chat Division, have been doing some terrific work lately. Here is a selection of some interesting and fun sessions.
 |
| 2015 finalists:: Cynthia Marr, Audrey Jun, and Chris Lundquist |
The National Center for State Courts is pleased to announce
a call for applications for the James E.
McMillan Award (McMillan Award) for Innovation in Court Technology. The winner, selected by a committee of court
technology experts, will receive a full scholarship to attend CTC 2021 in Columbus,
OH, September 28-29, 2021. This full
scholarship includes a waiver of conference registration, four nights accommodation
at a conference hotel, and round-trip travel expenses. The approximate value of
this scholarship is $2,000.
More...
The National Center for State Courts is excited to deliver the ideas, information, and strategies to put technology to work in our courts. Education is the reason we host the Court Technology Conference. As usual, we’re featuring multiple education tracks covering practical applications of technology and innovation. This year, there’s a particular focus on what we can learn from our pandemic experiences.
NCSC Releases Evaluation and Performance Measures Framework for Online Dispute Resolution (ODR) Programs
In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, state courts accelerated efforts to implement online dispute resolution (ODR) programs that offer litigants a software platform in which to resolve legal problems, including negotiating settlements or exchanging information in preparation for in-court hearings.
One of my more strongly held observations from working with court data is the statistical perceptions of case backlogs, or “pending cases” as they are generally used are simply wrong. I think that this is because they often do not really describe the court’s caseload situation. I explain...
Today marks the 50th Anniversary of the incorporation of the National Center for State Courts. The "founding moment happened on March 11, 1971.
Our press release said:
"It was 50 years ago — March 11, 1971 — that the First National Conference on the Judiciary opened at the Williamsburg Conference Center in Williamsburg, Virginia.
 |
| Alpine Texas Federal Courthouse |
The US Government General Services Administration’s 18F Team
performed an “11-week Path Analysis on the federal judiciary’s Case Management
and Electronic Case Files (CM/ECF) system. Our research focused on user needs,
business agility, organization and processes, and the Administrative Office of
the U.S. Courts’ (AO) culture and legal mandates.”
We discuss below.
Full details and application are available through NeoGov The posting closes on June 25, 2021.
The Chief Information Officer’s (CIO) role is to provide vision and leadership for identifying, acquiring and implementing information technologies for the Nevada Appellate Courts. The CIO consults and collaborates with the State Court Administrator/Director of the AOC, Clerk of Court, Supreme Court Justices, the Judicial Council Technology Committee, Supreme Court IT Steering Committee, and other committees as necessary to develop statewide information technology policies, strategies, and standards.
 |
| Abraham Lincoln as a young lawyer |
We have been saving a lot (and I mean “a lot) of interesting items to share in recent weeks. We have news about court data analytics in California, an academic paper questioning the use of arrest data in policy development, a new justice index ranking report for USA courts, a report on Fines and Fees policies, the application of microeconomics for policy development, the NIEM JSON Specification, Version 5.0 release candidate 2, Ohio Court News on sealed records, England and Wales reports on the results of their divorce online system, applying the PDF A-4 standard for permanent digital records, and an excellent Tiny Chat.
We learned from our friends earlier this week that the Florida courts are celebrating the 10th Anniversary of their E-filing Portal program. We will start with some history thanks to the summary they wrote in this year’s annual report or, if you wish, they have posted a three-minute history summary video online here.
Last month, the Arnold Ventures group released a report titled “We Need Criminal Justice Data That Doesn’t Exist. Here’s How the Biden Administration Can FixIt.”
This is a subject near and dear to me as I have been working on much of this for a long time. I agree
with many parts of the report. However,
I was disappointed to see that the full report missed many standards and frameworks that have been
previously built?
More below...
For CTC 2021, we're taking a hybrid approach to the Center's premier court technology conference. You can attend online or join us in Columbus, Ohio, from September 28–29, 2021.
While we don't have all the details ironed out, we're
looking forward to hosting attendees no matter how you choose to attend.
The Justia legal information company has posted a compendium of state court Covid-19 operations in all 50 states.
They write that “State court systems across the country have significantly altered their operations in response to the coronavirus pandemic. Many courts initially limited proceedings to only the most essential and urgent matters, such as arraignments and restraining order hearings."
"While most jurisdictions are beginning to resume at least some of their normal operations, courts often are still striving to conduct as many proceedings remotely as possible. Jury trials are suspended or limited in some locations, although most states at least have planned strategies for resuming them.”
Click here to access the guide.
Congratulations to Justia for providing this useful
resource.
--
Also thank you to the US Federal Courts news for posting the picture of Chief Judge James K. Bredar wearing a plastic face shield and sit behind plexiglass when jury trials resume in the U.S. District Court for the District of Maryland that we show above.
https://www.uscourts.gov/news/2020/08/20/courts-restore-operations-covid-19-creates-new-normal
The IJIS Institute has scheduled two virtual Zoom seminars for Tuesday, June 15, 2021. They write:
"From incident to final resolution and beyond, every action our courts take relies on accurate, complete, and timely data to best-inform decisions about people, cases, process, and policy. Join your colleagues from practice and industry at our technology summit on Tuesday, June 15th to dive into our courts' multifaceted data discussion - what we have and what we need - and the impact across the justice system and our communities."
We share some news and notes in this week’s CTB post. We note a speech-to-text AI demo video, text reminders, an event on transitioning your workforce back to the courthouse, yet another article on "Zoom courts", an NCSC Tiny Chat regarding court cell phone policy, and the NCSC website on pandemic response webinars that were recorded in 2020.
Earlier this month I was reading the opening day story about my Chicago Cubs baseball club and stumbled on the news that they have installed new AI-enhanced person scanning devices (pictured). The big benefit of this new technology is that one does not have to remove keys, mobile phone, or have your bag separately scanned. Great, right?
Details below...
My inbox received notices about three upcoming events that could be of interest to the court technology community. They are by Microsoft partner, Pythagoras in the UK; the Online Courtroom Project; and the latest in the World Justice Challenge 2021 competition. Additional details are listed below.
Microsoft announced an AI-powered live transcription service (AI we can use BTW) in Microsoft Teams, answering Zoom’s new feature. That got me thinking that they are not alone, as we share below...
--
Via press release, March 16, 2021.
NIJ has released a four-part series on Artificial
Intelligence (AI) in the Criminal Justice System.
Through the National Criminal Justice Reference Service, NIJ
has made available the following final technical reports (these reports are the
result of NIJ-funded projects but were not published by the U.S. Department
of Justice).
The third article in the series specifically discusses AI in the criminal courts.
Legal technology writer Molly McDonough posted an article about the Utah Outreach Court (https://twitter.com/saltlakejustice). That court takes a courtroom to the litigants, in some instances to the homeless person's campsite, using a repurposed mobile command center vehicle and tents.
Published by press release on March 4, 2021, in US Courts News
"Even as vaccines begin to protect the public from the coronavirus (COVID-19), one of the Judiciary’s biggest priorities is ensuring that the air inside courtrooms and hallways remains safe as courts schedule more in-person legal proceedings.
The Freakonomics website has a page that discusses the quote in the title of this post. It is
obviously appropriate for the courts in this time of the Covid-19 pandemic, but
I have used it in another context, when a new case, document, or e-filing
systems are being introduced into a court.
I explain below…
My friend Bob Ambrogi asked for comment during last Friday’s Legaltech Week Journalists’ Roundtable (an excellent discussion every week about our court customers). The discussion turned briefly to Jason Tashea's proposal via the DayOneProject.org initiative titled “Digitizing State Courts, Expanding Access to Justice”. The following is my partial reply to the question asked.
I applaud Mr. Tashea for thinking about the problem. But I think there is a lot more to consider and there are additional options? I explain…
Winter 2021
There is a massive amount of court technology news this month. We learned about, US Federal Courts response to the Covid-19 pandemic, conference news from the Innovating Justice 2021 and Legalweek 2021 events, California’s CourtStack initiative, Mark Beer’s upcoming talk on AI support for judicial decision making, Seattle and King County’s impact and response to the pandemic caseload, the NACM video podcast on Teleworking, and proposed USA federal government rules on digital format archiving.
