This and That in Court Technology - January, 2016

By Sinead Friel (Kangaroo  Uploaded by snowmanradio)
[CC BY 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0 )],
via Wikimedia Commons

In this month's news we have items from Australia, Indiana, Minnesota, the US Government Accountability Office, the FiveThirtyEight.com statistical analysis website, China, and the Consumer Electronics Show.

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.

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.

This and That in Court Technology – August, 2015

Lots of news for a hot and sticky summer week from Pennsylvania, Open Law Labs, Adobe, Washington DC, Arizona, Nebraska, and fun tech toy land.

Highlighting Some CTC-2015 Education Sessions

We share some CTC-2015 sessions that you might consider when attending the upcoming conference. But this article is mainly to show a sample of the outstanding conference content coming this fall in Minneapolis.

Nebraska Shares Court Case Data Protection Rules

There has been a recent discussion regarding how courts are dealing with information privacy issues for their document repositories.  The Nebraska courts have posted their criminal and civil case court rules governing these documents on two web pages.  And Ms. Jennifer Rasmussen, their CIO notes that “(t)hese rules have allowed us to make court document images available online since 2008 and are working well.  In addition, we did a spot check in 2013 to see if attorneys were complying and found very few instances where they were not.”

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…

Bankruptcy Courts Report Savings and other Benefits from Electronic Noticing

DeBN Logo Developed by the
Bankruptcy Court for the
Central District of California

Via press release on February 19, 2015, we learned about the US Bankruptcy court electronic noticing system.  They write:

"While business is increasingly conducted using smart phones, tablets and laptops, debtors who file for bankruptcy protection continue to receive paper copies of court notices and orders by regular mail — a practice that consumes both time and money. Thanks to a new program available through the Bankruptcy Noticing Center (BNC), debtors in participating courts now have the option of receiving court-generated notices and orders electronically.

CITOC Announces Innovation Awards

The national Court Information Technology Officers Consortium (CITOC) and the Conference of State Court Administrators honored the following courts with awards in December, 2014 during their annual conference.

•  Innovation in Business Process Award 2014: Superior Court of California, Orange County

•  Innovation in Technology Award 2014: North Carolina Administrative Office of the Courts

The Hagan Manifesto on PDF's

Used with permission from Ms. Hagan

Our favorite Law Design blogger, Ms. Margaret Hagan, has posted her “short manifesto” on “Law’s PDF Problem”.  I agree with her observations and offer some additional commentary.

Ms. Hagan is doing some excellent work in examining how legal systems have been designed (or not designed) over the past few years.  Her recent post looks at the problem of legal (including court) information being “buried in PDF’s”.  She notes:

Internet Access to Court Records Upsets Canadians

According to an article in The Globe and Mail newspaper, “(o)ver the past year, close to 100 people have complained to the Canadian Legal Information Institute (CanLII), after coming across legal decisions that mention their names through Google searches.  The rulings are public information, but most are shocked to see the details of their court cases – often family law, criminal or immigration matters – on the Internet for anyone to read.”

Supreme Court of the US Chief Justice Notes Technology in Year-End Report

In his tenth report, Chief Justice John Roberts focused on information technology in the US Courts (PDF).

E-Filing Benefits are Hard to Quantify

With E-courts 2014 coming next week, we share some thoughts on the difficulty in quantifying the benefits of E-filing.

US Federal Courts Data Conversion Explained

Many of you may have read about the controversy regarding some of the US Federal Courts "losing" PACER case file information.  Fortunately, the Wall Street Journal clarifies.

A2J Author Version 5.0 Released

The NCSC is very proud to share the following announcement of the important Access 2 Justice Author toolset that was first published on the CALI website

"The Center for Computer-Assisted Legal Instruction (CALI) and the Center for Access to Justice and Technology at IIT Chicago-Kent College of Law (CAJT) will be rolled out the new version of A2J Author® for the legal aid community on Friday, August 1, 2014 at 12 noon CST."

Three Interesting Things

This week we share some interesting ideas that have come to our attention on Pennsylvania’s new online Dependency Benchbook, an online support calculator, and how to publish Internet Calendars with Microsoft Office Outlook.

This and That in Court Tech – April, 2014

Time for our regular compilation of news we have heard about and related to court technology.

Court Decisions, “Link Rot”, and Perma.cc

As defined in Wikipedia, “Link rot” is an informal term for the process by which hyperlinks (either on individual websites or the Internet in general) point to web pages, servers or other resources that have become permanently unavailable.  This has become a serious problem in legal opinions and decisions.  A consortium of law libraries is taking action by creating Perma.cc.

Court Case Management Systems Part 13 - Public Access Capability and Interface Options

Court Case Management Systems record a lot of case information for a variety of reasons. Depending on where you are, who you are, and what you are doing with the data will determine your access… maybe?

PacerPro Reviewed

The US Federal Court’s 25 year old PACER system has received an update that is called PacerPro.  Robert Ambrogi in his "Ambrogi on Tech blog" at the American Bar Association's ABAJournal describes how the system works and the benefits in his post: Service offers a better way to search federal court records than PACER.