This and That in Court Technology – September, 2015

This month we have news and notes about a crowdsourcing funding project, advances in artificial intelligence powered speech recognition, criminal case E-filing in Illinois, some comments about the new Apple's iPad Pro and Pencil, a new tiny cheap computer, IBM pitches Watson to trial lawyers, solar windows, and cleaning your gadgets.

No Power? Some Ideas and Strategies to Consider

Morgan County, WV Courthouse Power

I suppose that the 10th Anniversary of Hurricane Katrina has me thinking about strategies for keeping the courthouse open.  In other words…”Plan B”.  And since, as you know, computers don’t work very well without some kind of “juice”, we will discuss aspects of electrical power.

Make Your Home Wi-Fi Work Better

A quick note before the weekend starts.  We received a link from our NCSC IT staff about a short online video by Vox.com on how to improve your home wireless (Wi-Fi) network performance.  It is really good. Check it out on YouTube by clicking here.

Cloud Backup

Former Intel CEO Andy Grove titled his 1999 book “Only the Paranoid Survive” which provides a good motto for thinking about protecting your personal and court data.  One potential solution that we will discuss in this article is backing your data up to “the cloud”.

Small Investment, Large Return Using Text and Mail Reminders

Our NCSC Justice Reform and Government Accountability (JRGA) project funded by USAID in Serbia reported great success using SMS text and mail reminders in the Misdemeanor Courts.

Hamilton County Indiana Leads E-Filing Implementation

Hamilton County Courthouse, Noblesville, IN

They will be the first county in the state to accept electronic court filings.

User Interface Changes – Are They Worth It?

I read a terrific blog post last month regarding the problems that result when websites or computer applications change their user interfaces.  We discuss below.

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.

Upcoming JTC Webinar on eBench and Judicial Tools

The Joint Technology Committee (JTC) of COSCA, NACM and the NCSC will host a webinar on Thursday, August 20, 2015 at 2:00pm EDT.  The topic will be "eBench and Dashboards – Making a Case for Judicial Tools".

Windows 10 – Very good so far, but be careful

I did my first Windows 10 computer upgrade yesterday.  And I learned some things to watch out for.