This and That in Court Technology – October, 2017

News from the California courts, digital recording technology advances, smartphone language interpretation, the NCRA, Social Security Number replacement, Mississippi court rules, a conference in New Zealand and a useful Dutch Legal Technology newsletter/blog, and a good CTC 2017 summary.

Preserving the Record

The article last week regarding Judge Michael Marcus and his website, smartsentencing.com got me thinking about one of the court’s most important duties, preserving the record.  I share my list of strategies and options below.

Blockchain for Criminal Charge Tracking?

https://goo.gl/qv8unC

A recent question to the NCSC Community bulletin board regarding Blockchain technology led to the following thoughts regarding its potential use in one of the most difficult problems we have faced in the justice community since the 1970’s, criminal charge tracking.  We discuss below.

Not Just Police Body Cams

GoPro Pet Camera Mounts

A recent Pennsylvania appellate court decision points out that the record keepers will deal with more than just law enforcement body camera evidence. Courts are having to deal with video evidence from many sources.

More From CourtHack 2.0

As promised, we have more details and now video from CourtHack 2.0.

Tech Notes – April, 2017

CourtHack 2017 Champions

News about CourtHack 2017, a podcast on law enforcement body-worn cameras and the courts, and more from Alabama on court records policy.

This and That in Court Tech – April, 2017

Illinois' Abraham Lincoln
statue in London

In this round-up of news, we hear about E-filing in Illinois, Identity Theft in Alabama, the NAJIS annual conference, Foxit PDF on forms, warnings about legal chatbots, an article on court/legal algorithmic projects, and an interesting cloud adoption survey results article.

This and That in Court Technology – December, 2016

In this month's edition, we have e-Courts information; some news items and announcements from Microsoft; Alameda County, California CMS problems; a new way to annotate legal briefs; and some holiday gift guides for last minute shopping.

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Online Identity, Verified?

http://www.berkeleyside.com/img_7570-2/ 

During the fantastic Law and Courts in an Online World conference in Melbourne, Australia the subject of online identity verification came up.  So I looked to see what services are potentially available to E-filing services and courts?

My Favorite Browser Extensions

The CTB has been delving into a lot of serious subjects lately.  So I thought it was time for a little fun.  In this post, I share a note about my favorite Google Chrome browser extensions.

US Federal Courts PACER Fees Litigation

US Federal Courthouse Las Cruces NM

An article posted at qz.com (Quartz) discusses the court case regarding fees for the public use of the US Federal Courts PACER system.  The article notes:

“the paywall that surrounds Pacer is facing what may be its most serious test since the service emerged 28 years ago. Judge Ellen Huvelle of the US district court in Washington DC is expected to decide in the coming days whether a lawsuit accusing the government of setting Pacer fees at unlawfully high rates can proceed. 

The case, which is seeking class-action certification, is being led by three nonprofits: the National Veterans Legal Service Program, the National Consumer Law Center, and the Alliance for Justice. Each group says it has downloaded documents from Pacer and incurred charges alleged to exceed the cost of providing the records. All say the setup violates the E-Government Act of 2002, which authorizes the judiciary to “prescribe reasonable fees”—and which the plaintiffs argue should limit the government to charge users “only to the extent necessary” to make the information available.”

The full article is worth reading because it provides some explanation of fee waivers and, the total amount of revenue generated that supports court automation that is not provided by Congress in budget appropriation.  We would also point out that there are additional issues such as costs relating to data privacy, redaction, and management that are not addressed in the article.

Argentina's Center for Judicial Information

For many years I have been an admirer for the Argentina Judiciary’s Center for Judicial Information website.  I think that it is one of the best judicial websites in the world and it is one that should be studied and monitored by other judiciaries.  Via our good friend, Mr. Luis Maria Palma, President of E-Justicia Latinoamerica and a Vice-President of the International Association for Court Administration we were able to contact Ms. Maria Bourdin, who late last year was named as head of their Ministry of Communication and Open Government.  She was kind enough to answer our questions and share information regarding their excellent court website.

This and That in Court Tech – February, 2016

Time again for another installment of “This and That”.  We have news about Legal Services Corporation grants, Baton Rouge Louisiana Family Court self-help website, US Federal Court law library changes, an article from Harvard Business Review, Microsoft releasing to open source artificial intelligence framework software, widely varying software licensing costs for police in the UK, and the CTB listed as one of the 50 must read blogs by State Tech Magazine.

Wanted: Competitors for Inaugural CourtHack

NCSC is sponsoring the first-ever CourtHack—a 30-hour hackathon—designed to develop new and innovative solutions to improve our nation’s court systems. CourtHack takes place March 4-5, 2016 at the Matheson Courthouse in Salt Lake City, Utah.

Microsoft Ends Older Internet Explorer Browser Support

Because the majority of our CTB readers use this browser, we recommend that you should plan to update or change in the very near future.

McMillan Award 2015 Finalist – Cynthia Marr

L to R: Cynthia Marr, Audrey Jun, and Chris Lundquist

In the third of three articles recognizing McMillan Award finalists, we present Ms. Cynthia Marr, Analytic Support Manager, Pierce County District Court in the State of Washington and their online customer service  improvement program.

An Interview with ProBono.net’s Claudia Johnson

Left to Right: Xander Karsten, Claudia Johnson,
and Liz Keith of Probono.net

One of our good friends in the court/justice technology business, Ms. Claudia Johnson of ProBono.net was recently interviewed.

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The interview was conducted by Mr. Stanley Ramdhany, a senior at Columbia University majoring in Sociology with a particular interest in the field of law and society.

He writes:

“In the field of public interest work, Claudia Johnson is renowned as one of the first law professionals to address the union between technology and legal aid.  On the topic of how she first entered the field, Claudia stated, “I decided to go to law school at U Penn, and there I fell in love with public interest work, by working with DV victims in Northern Philadelphia. At this point, I was very interested in national origin discrimination and LEP advocacy, so I did my Skadden Fellowship on language access for Medicaid/disabled communities with focus on LEP groups.”  It was there that Claudia first focused on the union of legal services and technology:  “I wanted to have a way to track patterns by health care plan, zip code, and client demographics. So I was looking for a relatable multidimensional database—in 1997. That did not exist in legal services, so we had to build our own.”

Click here for the full in-depth interview (and in my opinion it is a good read to learn about this amazing lady)

An Interview with TestNotice’s John Coggeshall

From time to time we here at the CTB want to make our readers aware of new products and services. In this post we talk with John Coggeshall, Co-Founder of TestNotice that provides notification services for drug and problem solving courts.  The service also has other potential uses.

New South Wales Australia Announces Online Court Project

Sydney, Australia Opera House
Photo by DAVID ILIFF.
License: CC-BY-SA 3.0

Via press release: Wednesday, 9 September 2015

Access to justice will be faster, easier and cheaper with the pilot of the State’s first Online Court, Attorney General Gabrielle Upton today announced.

The Online Court will initially be used for civil cases in the Local Court General Division and will eliminate the need for legal practitioners to attend pre-trial hearings in court.
Ms Upton said the use of online legal services which will improve access to justice and ensure services meet people’s expectations.

Ms. Audrey Jun Receives First McMillan Award

At CTC-2015, Ms. Audrey Jun from Courthouse Libraries BC (see bio below) received the first James E. McMillan Award (McMillan Award) for Innovation in Court Technology for their Clicklaw system.  An extract from her submission is shown below.  A full version of her paper is also available by clicking here.