Court Forms Online Plus Toolkit

Courts everywhere should check out the Court Forms Online MassAccess project that was created and maintained by the Document Assembly Line Project at the Suffolk Law’s Legal Innovation and Technology Lab in cooperation with the Massachusetts Access to Justice Commission’s COVID-19 task force.  But before we go further… the code tool sets are available online for free!  More…   

Self-Help Information by the Courts in 2021

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.  

Thoughts on Notes

 

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!

New Legal Document Tools Announced

 

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.

 

This and That in Court Technology, August 2021

 

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.

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.

This and That in Court Tech – September 2019

In this month’s compendium, we have a lot of news and comments about electronic documents.  The posts discuss online “phishing” scammers using fake legal documents, an audit report on the UK Court Modernization Program, a PDF standard implementation announcement by Microsoft, another court filer document redaction problem, the new public Texas court document portal, the 21st Century Integrated Digital Experience Act and a personal note on Judge Dorothy Nelson.

Criminal Justice System Information – A NoSQL Solution

Cards used in Bletchley Park during WWII

By James E. McMillan, Principal Court Management Consultant, National Center for State Courts

Summary: I think that I have found a solution for one of the most difficult problems in justice systems: the criminal case information data model and coinciding information accuracy.  I understand that this is a bold statement and therefore the following article explains it in some detail.

The problem with tracking criminal case information from inception (incident or indictment), through the process and subsequent consequences and compliance have always been complexity.  Criminal and juvenile case data includes charges, modifications, findings, orders, fines and restitution payment, and behavioral/remediation compliance that change and reconfigure in non-specific ways.  The graphic from a SEARCH Group Report below shows some of the data and workflows involved.

“AI” in Justice Systems

We heard about a new program that the San Francisco, California District Attorney is developing a program to attempt to reduce racial bias. That and another article on “AI Hype” and other AI development projects are in this week’s post.

Please Fix Your MS Word Court Forms

Warning, old guy (get off my lawn) rant follows...  Many of the Microsoft Word forms courts provide on their websites ARE NOT real forms.  The thing that makes me especially crazy is when one enters data on the line provided … the line extends/wraps.  Then I have to waste time to shorten the line and re-underline what I typed.  That said, we share what we think that courts should be doing below.

Akoma Ntoso Naming Convention Adopted as an OASIS-Open Standard

Edited from a press release received on March 5, 2019.

The OASIS LegalXML LegalDocML Technical Committee has achieved adoption of Akoma Ntoso markup structure of use “of XML within a Parliaments', Assembly's or Congress' document management processes, within courts' and tribunals' judgment management systems, and generally in legal documents including contracts.”

This and That in Court Tech – January 2019

In this edition, we share information about a new court use of social media report, mobile video conferencing and identity verification, Connecticut Probate Court E-Filing, digital blockchain marriage certificates, an excellent self-help center website, and an upcoming conference.

Plain Language Forms Implemented by the Abu Dhabi Courts

Abu Dhabi Courthouses

We heard late last month from our friend, Mohamed Hesham Elrafei of the Abu Dhabi Courts about their new initiative with plan language forms and documents.  He writes and credits several contributors to the ideas they used in their new applications.  He writes:

Court Case Management Systems Part 20: User Interface (UI) and More

https://goo.gl/UGJioL

In this long-delayed edition in the Court Case Management Systems (CCMS) series, we will discuss some thoughts on user interfaces (UI) for court systems.  It is an exciting time to explore this area because the technology is developing quickly, and there are many new possibilities for developers to consider.  And because of all the new developments, this article has been delayed many times.

But it is summer time and so it is time to dive in...

Note: Previous work by our colleagues at the NCSC and other experts provides the list of functionality (the what). This CCMS series has been our attempt to describe “how” technologies have been and could be used in the courts.  

Click here for the previous posts in this series.

E-Filing Used for Theft and Some Remediation Ideas

Thanks to a message via ImageSoft, we learned of a Florida Bar News article describing how a law office manager used the system to “file papers in a foreclosure case” and then took $130,000 that was “left over after the foreclosure sale”.  We discuss the actions taken by the E-Filing Authority and more below…

UK Small Claims Online System Updated

https://goo.gl/J9cxhN

We learned in a press release that our favorite and the original, small claims system for the UK Courts have been updated.  The press release is titled: "Quicker way to resolve claim disputes launched online: A new online service to make it quicker and easier for people to claim money owed, resolve disputes out of court and access mediation has gone live."

The new service is available at: https://www.gov.uk/make-court-claim-for-money

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.

A New NCSC Report on Automated Redaction

https://www.shareicon.net/ 

In a follow-up to the July paper on “Best Practices for Court Privacy Policy Formulation”, the NCSC with the support of The State Justice Institute, the new paper, "Automated Redaction Proof of Concept Report" addresses the need for policies and technology for redaction of protected information. 


More below…

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.

Structuring Documents – Why and How

The challenge we have as courts is to turn documents into actionable information.  We most commonly do this by re-entering data into the case management systems database.  The courts can and should do better by using the software that most everyone already owns.  We discuss below.