IJIS & LegalXML Announce "Springboard Program" for E-Filing

On April 2, 2013 the IJIS Institute issued a Call for Participation in cooperation with the OASIS LegalXML Electronic Court Filing workgroup to “spring” development and adoption of the 4.01 standards.

More on Open Document Format (ODF)

ODF is an XML international standard for word processing documents that is now fully supported in Microsoft's recent release of Office 2013.  Why does this matter?

Court Case Management Systems Part 7: Criminal Charges and Data Sharing

This chapter in our court case management series discusses criminal charge-related issues.

Court Policies Issued

Several courts have issued new court policies dealing with electronic device use in the courthouse, E-filing, and the California Attorney General provides mobile application privacy recommendations.

Skating to Where the Puck is Going

Celebrating the recent settlement of the National Hockey League labor dispute, we pay homage to Wayne "The Great" Gretsky's quote:  “Skate where the puck is going, not where it’s been”, this week we look at what courts could use from the 2013 Consumer Electronics Show (CES) show in Las Vegas.

LegalXML ECF 4.01 Approved as Committee Specification - Updated 12/9/12

We learned today that the LegalXML ECF committee has voted to approve the 4.01 draft and has forwarded it as a candidate OASIS specification.  Version 4.01 is a maintenance release that addresses minor schema and definition issues.

To view the specification click here.

More PDF/A News

A couple of announcements regarding the international PDF/A standard that courts should know. - Updated with link to the ISO draft standard.

Florida Bar Presentation on Mandatory Service by E-Mail & E-Filing

Florida Oranges

The Florida Bar Association has prepared a slide show, E-Things version 5.2 on Florida’s new mandatory Service by E-mail and E-Filing rules.

American Probation and Parole Association Issues Procurement Guide

APPA has issued a procurement guide for automated case management systems that provides structure and advise that the courts can use as well.

Microsoft and Open Document Format (ODF) and Why You Should Care

Electronic document formats matter for courts. This article discusses a recent Microsoft announcement.

More on PDF

The PDF document file format is confusing to many because it can do so much. This post provides a list of resources that may help.

This and That in Court Tech - April 2012

News from California, New York, Pennsylvania, and notes on web site development with SharePoint and a new draft URN:LEX standard.

PDF Isn't Permanent.

Recently I received an E-mail solicitation for a product called PDF Security Removal.  As many of you know, there are settings that work with Adobe Reader that supposedly keep a PDF document from being printed or saved.  So one more "advantage" of PDF electronic documents to serve as the permenant case file record is now obsolete.

This and That - October, 2011

CTC-2011 

The conference was a great success again this year.  For education session presentations and articles go to: http://www.ctc2011.org/Attendees/Program-at-a-glance.aspx and then click on the session name.

Registration Still Open for Privacy and Public Access Conference

Our partner, the Center for Legal and Court Technology has openings for the 8th Conference on Privacy and Public Access to Court Records to be held in Williamsburg, Virginia from November 3-4, 2011.  For more see the conference website at: http://www.privacy.legaltechcenter.net/aspx/Conferences.aspx

Eight Rules of E-Filing: Rule #7

E-Filing Should Support Government to Court Communications

The vast majority of E-filing systems focus upon civil case matters.  While there are many reasons I believe that besides vendor funding, this focus greatly reduces project political risk to the courts.  Judges have more discretion in managing civil cases and the parties can agree to work together to support new systems and procedures for everyone’s benefit.  In fact, this is how court E-filing started in 1990 in the Delaware Chancery Court.

But criminal and other cases involving human services and other government departments and programs are a different animal for E-filing.  In criminal cases the attorneys are continually looking for procedural mistakes and other errors in order dismiss cases and free or reduce the penalties for their clients.  In other words, the attorneys truly embrace their adversarial role with court procedures as well as the opposing side.  As a result, and along with funding challenges, there are only a handful of criminal case E-filing systems in the USA today.

Eight Rules of E-Filing: Rule #4

Rule Number 4: Court document creation must be integrated with the CMS.  

A great percentage of documents in a case file are produced by the court.  Therefore it is imperative that a court e-filing system seamlessly interact with the court’s case management system (CMS) and word processing capabilities.

Eight Rules of E-Filing: Rule #2

Rule Number 2: User authentication must be designed into the overall e-filing solution.

For too long court E-filing has been generally limited to civil case matters.  This is perfectly understandable from a legal viewpoint since the parties and/or court can simply agree to its use.  But today we should design E-filing systems to deal with all case types such as criminal and juvenile that has a decidedly greater need for user verification.

NIEM Children, Youth, and Family Services Domain Draft Released

The governance team of the National Information Exchange Model's Children, Youth, and Family Services Domain (NIEM CYFS) invites you to review and critique its new schema.  We appreciate your feedback and ask that you send your comments to dgraski@ncsc.org by July 15, 2011.

The beta version of CYFS 2.1.1 can be viewed in several formats.  For a comprehensive list of all of the elements (properties), types, and code lists (enumerations), this html view works best:  http://www.waterholesoftware.com/downloads/cyfs211/cyfs211.html.  Several other tools found at http://cyfsdomain.org enable keyword searches and graphical views (e.g., NIEM Wayfarer).

The purpose of the CYFS domain is to support timely, complete, accurate, and efficient information sharing among the child support, child welfare, juvenile justice, family court, and related partners that can help improve outcomes for children and youth whose circumstances make them particularly vulnerable.  The inaugural content for the domain – part of NIEM 2.1’s release in September 2009 – was extracted from extension schema specifying national reference models for six data exchanges between courts and child-support enforcement agencies, and between courts and child welfare agencies.  The CYFS Domain release planned for August 2011 will integrate the Juvenile Justice XML data model developed by the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention’s Juvenile Information Sharing Initiative.  In addition, the August 2011 domain update will include data elements from three notification exchanges (court event, representation, and placement change).

The National Judicial-Child Support Task Force, sponsored by the Department of Health and Human Services’ Administration for Children and Families’ Office of Child Support Enforcement (OCSE), developed two information exchange models using NIEM’s predecessor, the Global Justice XML Data Model.  The Task Force included representatives from state and tribal CSE agencies and courts, staff from OCSE’s regional and central offices, and the National Center for State Courts (NCSC).  The Initial Request for Remedy IEPD describes the agency’s case-initiation message to the court; the Child Support Order IEPD describes the court’s findings and judgment concerning the financial responsibilities of a child’s non-custodial parent.

The Court/Child Welfare National Exchange Template (NET) Project developed several national reference models to describe the exchange of information between a state or county child welfare agency and a court with jurisdiction over child abuse, neglect, and dependency cases.  The NET team included representatives from HHS ACF Children’s Bureau’s Division of State Systems, two of the Children’s Bureau’s National Resource Centers (Child Welfare Data & Technology, and Legal & Judicial Issues), representatives from state and local child welfare agencies and courts, and NCSC.

OJJDP’s National Juvenile Information Sharing Initiative (NJIS) worked with one of its JIS pilot sites to identify and develop several high-priority data exchange specifications, including education messages between juvenile probation, law enforcement, and a public school district.  In a collaborative effort, OJJDP’s NJIS worked with the University of Massachusetts Medical School to develop the data exchange for  the Massachusetts Youth Screening Instrument (MAYSI-2).  This data exchange has been successfully implemented at one of the NJIS’s pilot sites.  Additional data exchanges developed include information regarding a serious, habitual offender direct intervention (SHODI), record of law enforcement’s Field Contact with a juvenile, and Human Service placement and services exchanges.

Notes on Court Document Redaction

Our friends at Princeton University's Center for Information Technology Policy (CITP) have posted a very interesting article "Studying the Frequency of Redaction Failures in PACER".  As most of you know, PACER is the US Federal Courts program for access to court case management and case documents that have been either E-filed or scanned.  CITP author Timothy B. Lee explains the differences in PDF and other formats that are used in electronic document systems and the software they developed to study the problem (which they make available).  The article ends with a discussion on technical approaches that could be used to address the redaction issue.

In addition, there are other technical resources available.  For example, if you use Adobe Acrobat Pro one might want to check out a couple of web pages and videos on subject here and here.

Today courts are often placing the burden of redaction upon the litigants.  The Wyoming courts have earlier this year released new rules on document redaction that can be viewed here.

And other redaction rules have been posted by the following courts:

• USA Federal Courts
• Nevada State Courts
• Washington State Courts

Note - the accompanying graphic was adapted from the publically available picture of a redacted page from the ACLU vs. Ashcroft lawsuit.

Federal Courts Work on their Archives

Another excellent article in the US Federal Courts newsletter. The Third Branch from their May, 2011 edition shares news of recent work being done by the Judicial Conference Committee on Court Administration and Case Management Records Subcommittee.

The article, Making Room-Saving History, summarizes work being done by the Federal Courts with the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) to reduce the massive accumulation of records that "cost the Judiciary over $6.2 million last year".

The article notes:

""Records had accumulated for decades and had become an unmanageable mass," said Judge Steven Merryday (M.D. Fla.), then chair of the Records Subcommittee, part of the Judicial Conference Committee on Court Administration and Case Management (CACM). "With the potential of rising storage costs, we were facing catastrophic budget consequences." Merryday's subcommittee began by looking for ways to preserve what needed to be kept and what could be disposed. They sought the advice of the head of the National Archives and court representatives. The subcommittee went over, code by code, what would be found in a file, and agreed on what should be preserved. Then they made their recommendations to the full CACM Committee and then to the Judicial Conference."

The article further notes:

This is the first time in more than 30 years that NARA has been able to dispose of any federal court case records. They've begun with paper civil case files dating back to 1970. But before they dispose of any files, courts have the ability to designate "non-trial temporary case" files between 1970 and 1995 as historic. These files will be retained and stored. All cases filed at any time that proceeded to trial, and all cases filed before 1970 are automatically designated permanent and will not be destroyed. The remaining cases will be indexed and become easier to access.

What is considered historically significant? The CACM Committee, working with NARA, federal judges, historians, and academics, proposes that certain case records be designated permanent. Cases of historic significance would involve particular issues such as state reapportionment cases, civil rights voting cases, treason, national security, family farm and historic bankruptcy cases, and death penalty habeas corpus cases. Judges and clerks of court also are asked to designate cases that:

• Involved a lawyer, litigant, or witness of historical interest or importance;
• Involved an issue of historical interest;
• Involved a matter of national interest separate from the issues in the litigation; or
• Received substantial media attention at the time.

Several state courts have done similar work including promenently the New York State Judiciary Records Management program.  For a list of their policies click here.