Showing posts with label Electronic Evidence. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Electronic Evidence. Show all posts

Thursday, July 9, 2020

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.

Thursday, May 7, 2020

This and That in Court Technology May 2020



In this month’s highlights we share information about the PASS (Public Access Software Spec), our NCSC Tiny Chat about digital signatures, e-notarization and digital notice, Tyler’s Virtual Court offering, virtual court hearings in Nigeria, an electronic hearing practice guide posted by the Trinidad and Tobago Judiciary, and special offers by Microsoft for public safety and non-profits in response to the pandemic.


Monday, April 6, 2020

Online Training on Court Tech Response to the Pandemic


https://www.ncsc.org/


There are multiple training events and podcasts on technology and management responses to the COVID-19 pandemic.  The NCSC is hosting an online seminar on Tuesday, April 7 at 3:00 PM EDT. 

Details on that and others are listed below:



Friday, March 27, 2020

Court Web Conferencing Tips





In the time of the COVID-19 pandemic, we want to share some tips from more than twenty years using videoconferencing and web conferencing technology for presentations, technology development and support.  We begin:




Thursday, December 5, 2019

What technology will courts be using in 5 years’ time?


Hon. Judge Andrea Tsalamandris

We are pleased to share the following post from our friend, the Hon. Judge Andrea Tsalamandris from Melbourne, Australia on "how technology can be used by judges and court administration to create efficiencies in our courts, and enhance access to justice.


Friday, July 26, 2019

Punchline – Google Edition – And an Idea



This is a short note today due to travel regarding a CBS News report titled “CBS News investigation finds fraudulent court orders used to change Google search results” from July 25, 2019.  The report explained that:
“A Google search can reveal negative information about anyone or any company. Since it's difficult to change those results, many small businesses are paying thousands to so-called reputation management companies to make negative web pages disappear.”
They further explained:
“One of the only ways to get Google to permanently remove a link from its search results is with a court order from a judge. CBS News sorted through thousands of these court orders and spotted small businesses from all across America trying to clean up their reputations. But we also spotted a problem: Dozens of the court documents were fakes.”
If you get a chance to watch the video it shows that the fraudsters simply cut and pasted images of the court stamps and judges signatures.  Thus here is yet another example of how the authentication method of signatures and blue rubber stamps is outdated. 

We have posted many articles on this type of problem before. But, I want to offer another idea?  Why not set up a new “verified electronic copy” service with fees that Google and others could pay to the court to receive a verified copy … with ideally an electronic signature.  The fee would very likely be passed along by Google to the persons/companies who legitimately should have their web page/link removed.  And of course, the fee rule could allow for the court to issue a waver.

So accurate information, problems for the fraudsters, and fee to help courts pay for the service.  What’s not to like?


Thursday, September 20, 2018

This and That in Court Tech – September 2018


eCourts Conference

News on the eCourts 2018 conference, a new ODR pilot for small claims cases in Utah, security problems with the GovPayNow.com website, the IBM Watson AI based closed captioning system, and the UK Metropolitan Police developed mobile fingerprint system.


Friday, August 24, 2018

This and That in Court Technology – August 2018


In this edition, we share news about eCourts 2018 conference, law enforcement body cameras, the 25th anniversary of PDF, and microfilm to digital conversion technology to write up while the software is installing on my new laptop. 


Friday, June 1, 2018

Digital Evidence Collection Standards



In the “missed an announcement in December category”, the US National Institute for Standards and Technology (NIST) released federated testing tools that are “designed to help law enforcement and forensic practitioners”…”in making a copy of the data from a seized electronic device”.

Since courts deal with evidence, we need to discuss this below…


Wednesday, February 14, 2018

Technology, Borders and the Law



An excellent and thought-provoking post by Amy L. Howe on her blog discusses the current case before the Supreme Court of the United States regarding law enforcement warrant based access to Microsoft E-mail stored overseas in Ireland.

This is but one example of a huge issue facing the law and courts as technology makes national borders increasingly meaningless.


Wednesday, December 13, 2017

Structuring Court Communications with an App



Courts are different than many other businesses or services.  A rather obvious statement I know.  But a very important difference is that we have very formal court rules and legal statutes that create the steps, as well as boundaries, in how information is presented.  The rules also determine how the courts evaluate the completeness and truthfulness of the information presented.  Because of these structures and rules, I have been very cautious about the court's use of social media that as we know, have very few if any rules.

But communication is hard for many people.  This is especially true for communication that is structured to persuade or argue a point of view or law.  Therefore, an app that helps people, especially the self-represented litigants to accomplish this, is of great interest to me.



Thursday, August 3, 2017

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.


Friday, July 7, 2017

Loomis vs. Wisconsin Cert Denied



The Supreme Court of the United States denied cert in a case asking to expose the risk algorithm used by Northpointe's COMPAS system.


Friday, June 23, 2017

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.




Wednesday, October 26, 2016

This and That in Court Technology – October, 2016

Microsoft Surface Studio


It was a busy month in court technology. In this post we share news about judicial decision prediction system, a court rejecting e-signed documents, a new online traffic ticket mediation implementation, several Microsoft related technology announcements, and last call for the Australia legal and court technology conference registration.


Wednesday, July 27, 2016

More Developments in Blockchain Technology and the Law


Blockchain technology or as it is also known as, “distributed ledger”, is the subject of a great deal of thinking and development this year.  We wrote about it earlier in the year and now we share some recent work being done at MIT Media Lab’s lawchain.org project.


Tuesday, May 3, 2016

Another Technology to Plan For: Blockchain Contracts


As we all know, courts have to deal with contracts between parties.  And courts also very often have to verify the authenticity of information.

There is a lot of work going on using Blockchain database technology.  So it is time to learn about and plan for its use in the justice system.  We discuss below.


Friday, November 27, 2015

Watson Law


An article about a talk by Ms. Kyla Moran, IBM senior consultant with the Watson Industry Leadership group at a Legal Futures Annual Conference in London, England has me thinking…


Wednesday, March 18, 2015

A CCMS Smart Document Receipt Concept


Recently I have been working on the concept of a “smart receipt” that would be generated by a CCMS for either E-filing or “in-person” filing.  I share my ideas in the article below…