Some CTC 2019 Highlights

If you weren’t one of the 1,400 or so people who attended CTC 2019 on Sept. 10-12 in New Orleans, you missed a lot of great information, but here’s a summary of a handful of some well-attended sessions. 

We will have additional articles on the conference in the upcoming weeks.

OASIS Litigant Portal Draft Standard Review

OASIS and the OASIS Litigant Portal (LP) TC are pleased to announce that Litigant Portal Exchange Version 1.0 is now available for public review and comment.

The Litigant Portal Exchange 1.0 (LPX 1.0) standard consists of a set of non-proprietary message specifications and data models, along with clarifying explanations, to promote interoperability between litigant portal systems, courts, legal assistance providers and related systems. Portal modules are designed to provide assistance to self-represented litigants.

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.

What to know before you go to CTC 2019

This week's CTB post shares all the information you need for the Court Technology Conference (CTC) 2019 next week in New Orleans, Louisiana from September 10-12, 2019.

It is going to be a terrific conference!  See you there.

Sharing and Highlighting

We learned via an article and video report from KSAT television news in San Antonio, Texas titled “Enormous justice system gap closed, allowing courts to communicate better” about a new system in Bexar County, Texas to make “firearm bans now more visible to more judges”. 

A Couple of Good Mobile Court Apps

Our friends in the Abu Dhabi Judicial Department have developed a couple of simple and easy to use court apps.  They are available in English and Arabic on the Apple App Store so you can download them to see how they work?

ODR 2019 Conference Agenda Released

The Online Dispute Resolution Forum  (https://www.ncsc.org/odr2019 ) agenda has been released and is shown below.  The conference will be held from October 28-30 with a special pre-conference event on October 28 in the home of the NCSC, Williamsburg Virginia.

The agenda includes reports and lessons from the real-world application of ODR in the courts both in the USA and internationally.  The agenda looks great!

Click here for registration.

2019 State Court E-Filing Program Status List

We compiled the following list of court E-filing program links in August 2019.  This is an update to the list we created in 2016.  We found information for every state and territory except Oklahoma and American Samoa.  Congratulations to all the courts for their
hard work.

Improving-Child-Support-Enforcement Outcomes with ODR in Michigan

https://www.miottawa.org/aboutottawa.htm

Our NCSC KIS group recently posted one of our "Trends" articles by Kevin Bowling and Jannell Challa of the Michigan 20th Circuit Court along with NCSC colleague, Di Graski on how ODR facilitated communications to improve child support outcomes for the participants and the court (PDF).  Please read more about this significant achievement below:

Punchline – Google Edition – And an Idea

This is a short note today due to travel regarding a CBS News report titled “CBS News investigation finds fraudulent court orders used to change Google search results” from July 25, 2019.  The report explained that:

“A Google search can reveal negative information about anyone or any company. Since it's difficult to change those results, many small businesses are paying thousands to so-called reputation management companies to make negative web pages disappear.”

They further explained:

“One of the only ways to get Google to permanently remove a link from its search results is with a court order from a judge. CBS News sorted through thousands of these court orders and spotted small businesses from all across America trying to clean up their reputations. But we also spotted a problem: Dozens of the court documents were fakes.”

If you get a chance to watch the video it shows that the fraudsters simply cut and pasted images of the court stamps and judges signatures.  Thus here is yet another example of how the authentication method of signatures and blue rubber stamps is outdated. 

We have posted many articles on this type of problem before. But, I want to offer another idea?  Why not set up a new “verified electronic copy” service with fees that Google and others could pay to the court to receive a verified copy … with ideally an electronic signature.  The fee would very likely be passed along by Google to the persons/companies who legitimately should have their web page/link removed.  And of course, the fee rule could allow for the court to issue a waver.

So accurate information, problems for the fraudsters, and fee to help courts pay for the service.  What’s not to like?