The 2017 McMillan Scholarship Award Winner

Jose Lezcano and Jim McMillan

Jose Lezcano, the Judicial Branch IT Director in Puerto Rico was honored with the McMillan Scholarship at the CTC 2017 Conference for his technology leadership.  More below:

CTC 2017 – a Milestone Conference

The conference held in Salt Lake City, Utah from September 12-14, 2017 had many significant events and presentations.  We will start the list in this post with more to come in the very near future.

Tech Ideas for Court Emergency and Disaster Planning

Hurricane Irma from the ISS

With the recent serious storms in the USA, planning to deal with emergency situations is on our minds.   But many things have changed because of the court's conversion to E-filing and electronic documents. We discuss below.

CTC-2017 News - Get Ready

Court Technology Conferences are an incredible deal. Many other tech conferences cost $1,500 or more.  When we make this post, there are less than two days to register for the conference at the regular rate.  CTC is the event of the year, some highlights below.

Preserving the Record

The article last week regarding Judge Michael Marcus and his website, smartsentencing.com got me thinking about one of the court’s most important duties, preserving the record.  I share my list of strategies and options below.

Judge Michael Marcus – The Passing of a Court Tech Pioneer

Hon. Michael Marcus

Last month we were saddened to hear of the passing of Judge Michael Marcus formerly of the Multnomah County (Portland, Oregon) Circuit Court.  I had the great pleasure of knowing Michael since the late 1990’s because of his work in developing the concept of “Smart Sentencing”.   A video of a presentation Judge Marcus made on his work from 2010 is available here.

Judge Marcus also wrote one of the most popular articles in the history of the Court Tech Bulletin about his "Search for a Quiet Keyboard” in 2007.

But back to the main subject below.

This and That in Court Technology – August, 2017

https://goo.gl/PLWoi1

A big CTC-2017 promotion (especially if you are hungry), an upcoming JTC webinar, big E-filing news, Wyoming court automation fees introduced, space and cost savings by the US Federal Courts, and a little tip in this month’s court tech news amalgamation.

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.

NCSC Releases New Report on Court Privacy Policy

A State Justice Institute supported report, “Best Practices for Court Privacy Policy Formulation” authored by three of our NCSC colleagues, Tom Clarke, Jannet Lewis and Di Graski has just been released.  The report begins:

"As state and local courts progressively convert their business processes from paper to electronic formats, policies around remote electronic access to court case information by the public become ever more important.  COSCA last addressed this issue comprehensively in 2002 with a report authored by Martha Steketee and Alan Carlson that proposed a model policy for public access.  At that time, few courts had implemented electronic filing, so the model policy addressed both manual and electronic access.  In the fifteen years since then, courts have learned a lot about living in an electronic world and providing remote access to their case data and documents.  Consequently, there is a need to update what we know about this topic and revise the model policy."

August 31, 2017 revision -- click here to access the updated paper. 

Cobb County Georgia Issues Court Tech RFI

Cobb County (“County”) invites qualified technology companies (“Responders”) to submit written information about their ability to provide the modules needed to support countywide court and justice partner operations and case management with the goal of providing better access to justice and improving internal efficiencies.