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.
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Suffolk Law School Forms Creation Online
Our friend Professor Quinten Steenhuis (and BTW a good Twitter follow @QSteenhuis) posted that they have made 31 updates to their CDC eviction moratorium tool that is part of their Court Forms Online project at the LegalInnovation and Technology Lab.
The website is at: https://courtformsonline.org/
I would encourage courts to work with the law
schools in their state as Suffolk has with the Massachusetts Trial Court.
Social Media and Judge Security
Via legal tech journalist Nichole Black’s ( https://twitter.com/nikiblack
) Twitter feed and press release we learned that Twitter can be dangerous to one’s freedom when
abused. A press release from the United
States Attorney’s Office in the Western District of Pennsylvania said:
“PITTSBURGH - A resident of Paramus, New Jersey, pleaded
guilty and was sentenced in federal court in relation to a charge of making
restricted information publicly available, Acting United States Attorney
Stephen R. Kaufman announced today.
William Kaetz, age 56, pleaded guilty to one count before
United States District Judge J. Nicholas Ranjan.
In connection with the guilty plea, the court was advised
that on October 18, 2020, Kaetz publicly posted the home address of a United
States District Court Judge to the social media sites Facebook and Twitter, and
did so with the intent to threaten or intimidate, or with the intent and
knowledge that others would use the information to threaten or intimidate, said
judge.
Following the guilty plea hearing, Judge Ranjan sentenced
Kaetz to a term of imprisonment of 16 months, with three years’ supervised
release and a fine of $5,000.”
Engineering Gatherings
Another friend, Professor Cat Moon Tweeted: “So heartened
that author/podcaster Priya Parker https://twitter.com/priyaparker shares a story about reinventing
"gatherings" in *a courthouse* at the very beginning of her wonderful
book The Art of Gathering.” This
excellent book “delivers formulas for
better get-togethers”. While this is not
technology, it is critical for how we use technology for in-person and virtual
meetings to achieve their purpose.
https://www.amazon.com/Art-Gathering-How-Meet-Matters/dp/1594634920
https://www.npr.org/2021/07/13/1015799443/hosting-gathering-dinner-party-how-to-tips-checklist
New Mexico Magistrate (Limited Jurisdiction) E-filing
Implemented
Via press release on July 27, 2021
SANTA FE — Attorneys can now electronically file civil
lawsuits in magistrate courts across New Mexico.
“Electronic filing benefits all New Mexicans because it
improves the efficiency of our courts,” Chief Justice Michael E. Vigil said.
E-filing allows litigants to submit digital documents
instead of paper and, if they choose, to electronically deliver copies to other
parties in the case. Attorneys are able to conveniently initiate civil lawsuits
and file subsequent documents in cases without traveling to a magistrate court.
This saves time for attorneys and their staff. E-filing
streamlines court operations because staff no longer must convert paper
documents from attorneys into a digital format for the computerized case
management system used to docket and process cases.
The final phase of a statewide implementation of e-filing in
magistrate courts was completed when the service became available Monday, July
26”…
“E-filing and service of documents occurs through the online
File & Serve system, which is used by attorneys for civil and criminal
cases in district courts, civil cases in the Bernalillo County Metropolitan
Court, all case types in the Court of Appeals and nearly all case types in the
state Supreme Court.”
Retrospective of Courthouse Design
The NCSC has released online "The Retrospective of
Courthouse Design 2011-2020," report which highlights and illustrates the
architectural innovations designed to accommodate evolving judicial work
environments over the past decade. There
is a section on how technology has been used in these courthouses. Read the publication online here:
http://ow.ly/iVEi50FGzCB
Conference of Chief Justices & COSCA Support Remote and Virtual Hearings
A resolution at the 2020 Annual meeting stated in part:
NOW, THEREFORE, BE IT RESOLVED, the Conference of Chief
Justices and the Conference of State Court Administrators urge their members to
apply the guiding principles for court technology to remote and virtual
hearings and support technology innovations to facilitate access to justice, so
that all court users get the help they need and are treated with dignity.
Because virtual and remote hearings can pose challenges,
courts are encouraged to consider:
1) Ensuring that all users, even those with difficulty using
technology or who do not have access to reliable internet with necessary
bandwidth, can still participate. This may require offering the option to
appear in person or remotely, the provision of technology or access points in
the court and community, and flexibility in allowing a video participant to transition
to voice only, other adaptations caused by bandwidth or technology
problems.
2) Making adjustments and being sensitive to privacy issues
arising from court users having to appear remotely from a public or non-private
space.
3) Carefully considering what case types and hearing types
are appropriate for virtual hearings and which are not.
4) Ensuring that all parties to a dispute—regardless of
English proficiency, disability, socio-economic status or whether they are
self-represented—can meaningfully participate in court processes.
5) Adjusting the scheduling of hearings to allow adequate
time to orient people and to handle any technology issues. Virtual hearings may
take more or less time than in-person hearings and hearings that are hybrid,
with people in person and virtually appearing, may require more time to set up
and manage; and
To me, #4 is the most important one… justice accessibility.
A Beautiful Power Tool to Scrape, Clean, and Combine Data
One of my favorite tech columnists, Jon Udell writes:
Labels like “data scientist” and “data journalist” connote
an elite corps of professionals who can analyze data and use it to reason about
the world. There are elite practitioners, of course, but since the advent of
online data a quarter-century ago I’ve hoped that every thinking citizen of the
world (and of the web) could engage in similar analysis and reasoning.
That’s long been possible for those of us with the ability
to wrangle APIs and transform data using SQL, Python, or another programming
language. But even for us it hasn’t been easy.
All the ingredients are lying around in plain sight, but the
effort required to combine them winds up being more trouble than it’s worth.
And that’s for me, a skilled longtime scraper and transformer of web data. For
you — even if you’re a scientist or a journalist! — that may not even be an
option.
Enter Workbench, a web app with the tagline: “Scrape, clean,
combine and analyze data without code.” I’ve worked with tools in the past that
pointed the way toward that vision. DabbleDB in 2005 (now gone) and Freebase
Gridworks in 2010 (still alive as Open Refine) were effective ways to cut
through data friction. Workbench carries those ideas forward delightfully. It
enables me to fly through the boring and difficult stuff — the scraping,
cleaning and combining — in order to focus on what matters: the analysis.
For my techno-geek friends… this is interesting?
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