Court Technology Bulletin

Monday, February 8, 2010

Florida State Courts Administrator Issues RFP for Governance Study

The Florida Office of State Courts Administrator, Strategic Planning Unity has recently issued a Request for Proposals for a Judicial Branch Governance Study. The RFP is in concert with Florida Supreme Court Administrative Order AOSC09-43 issued in October, 2009 that:

Directs the Judicial Branch Governance Study Group to undertake an in-depth study of the current governance system of the judicial branch of Florida. The study group is directed to submit a final report and recommendations to the court no later than December 31, 2010.

The order further directs that the report shall contain:

1 An examination of the structure and functions of the present governance system of the Florida judicial branch and an assessment of its efficacy and efficiency;
2 Recommendations of actions or activities that the study group concludes would advance improvement in the governance of the judicial branch; and,
3 Recommendations of any changes to the present governance system that the study group concludes would
improve the effective and efficient management of the Florida judicial branch.

A copy of the RFP in PDF form can be downloaded from:
http://www.flcourts.org/gen_public/purchasing/bin/RFP-10-001-BF.pdf

Thursday, February 4, 2010

US Federal Courts Provide Guidance on Juror Smart Phone Use

On January 24th, the US Federal Courts Judicial Comittee on Court Administration and Case Management for the US District Courts issued instructions to be provided to jurors regarding the use of cell phones and computers during their service.
A Network World article posted on February 2, 2010 titled - Courts move to ban juror use of Blackberry, iPhone, Twitter and Facebook provides a summary of this action.
The court instructions can be downloaded in PDF at: http://www.uscourts.gov/newsroom/2010/DIR10-018.pdf

Wednesday, January 20, 2010

COSCA Whitepaper on Digital Recording

The Conference of State Court Administrators adopted the white paper titled - Digital Recording: Changing Times for Making the Record at their December, 2009 meeting. The paper notes challenges to the current method listing the Decline in Court Reporter Resources and Efficient, Timely Transcript Production and Access to the Record. The also note opportunities of Digital Recording including the Fundamentals of the technology, access, administrative control, integration of digital recordings with CMS and potential for cost savings.

Tuesday, January 12, 2010

E-Courts 2010 Date Correction

The E-Courts Conference West to be held in Las Vegas at the Red Rock Resort will be held from December 13-15, 2010. The previously announced dates, December 6-8 were incorrect. Many apologies for the mistake. E-Courts Conference East will be held in Tampa, Florida from September 13-15, 2010 at the Marriott Waterside.

Tuesday, January 5, 2010

New Release of CAMeditor Available

From a press release issued on December 16, 2009:

A new release of CAMeditor v1.7 is now available with NIEM 2.1 and LEXS 3.1.4 support. CAMeditor is an XML Editor/Validation/Schema Designer. Implements OASIS CAM standard & NIEM IEPDs. Outline & expand from XML Component Dictionary. Build/Load XSD schema, make XML samples, HTML docs, detect NDR bugs; generate dictionary CCTS. Eclipse Java & XSLTSaxon.

For the CAMeditor significant changes include improvements to the Eclipse user interface and template structure display along with enhancing the top down designer and generation and handling of large dictionary structures. Also included is a new LEXS 3.1.4 dictionary with sample expander blueprint templates for LEXS messages and updates of the NIEM dictionary files to the NIEM 2.1 release. Various NIEM related enhancements have been made in support of better IEPD generation http://www.niem.gov . CAMeditor is built using Eclipse, Java, and Saxon xslt.

The CAMV validation engine is now a thread-safe implementation supporting deployment in middleware containers such as jBOSS or IBM Websphere MQ™. Validation of exchange structures now allows handling of very large XML instances with checking of a discreet subset of business content requirements. Also integration support for Java call methods SDOM has been implemented CAMV is developed in Java using Saxon, Xerces and XPath v2.0 support.

The project vision is to provide the leading open source toolset for implementing standards based information exchanges with XML, including the NIEM IEPD approach. Simplifying and speeding the development process and enhancing the quality of your resulting schema for superior XML exchanges. To date we have had over 15,500 downloads from Sourceforge.net http://www.sourceforge.net/projects/camprocessor .

Saturday, December 19, 2009

US Federal Courts Issue Long Range Plan

The US Federal Judiciary has shared their Long Range Plan for Information Technology, FY 2009 on the Internet. The introduction of the plan states: " For judges and court staff, using information technology IT is no longer discretionary; rather, it is simply the way they do their work."

Friday, December 18, 2009

E-Courts 2010

Twice the information is coming next year. The 2010 E-Courts conferences will be held East in Tampa, Florida from September 13-15, 2009 and West in Las Vegas, Nevada from December 6-8. We are beginning development of the agenda for the conferences that will focus on technology opportunities to be more efficient with less resources as well as on developments in the Justice Reference Architecture and justice information sharing. But not to fear, E-filing and the conversion to the paper on demand electronic records will still be a major focus.

The updated conference website should be up and running in the new year. The website address as always is: http://www.e-courts.org/

Prison Inmates Can E-File in US Federal Court

The November, 2009 issue of The Third Branch newsletter for the US Federal Courts contains an article describing the E-filing system that has been established by the US District Court for the Central District of Illinois for prison inmates from the Pontiac Correctional Facility. The project allows for scanned PDF documents to be submitted to the court. The article notes:

Judge Harold Baker C.D. Ill. credits pro se law clerk Cynthia Diane Fears with first proposing the project. Baker said he and his pro se law clerks are very satisfied with its implementation. We’re delighted. Our court will accept e-filing with every other institution willing to work with us, he said.

This edition of the newsletter also contains an article: The 7th Circuit Pilot Program Provides a New Approach to E-Discovery. The article begins:

Electronically stored information ESI touches all aspects of our lives, said Chief Judge James F. Holderman, Jr N.D. Ill., which means that, when it comes to discovery, it’s really electronic discovery. Yet we rely on the same paper discovery procedures we’ve used for the last century to work for e-discovery. They’re just outdated. We need a new approach.

Friday, December 11, 2009

NCSC and HHS Collaborate on NIEM Messages

The November, 2009 NIEM Newsletter contains an article on the joint NCSC and US Department of Health and Human services development of data exchange templates for:

Juvenile Petition
Adjudication Order
Service Plan
Court Report

The article notes that:

A field test in Vermont has revealed that the template can accommodate an overwhelming percentage of use cases without modification.

More E-Reader News and Reviews

Because judges in particular spend inordinate amount of their time reading, we are following developments for E-Readers. First, a couple of new tech readers/pads are being released. The first example is the new Barnes and Noble “Nook” reader. Reviews have been posted first at Technologizer.com and later at Engaget.com

A second recent announcement regards the device formerly known as the CrunchPad. It has been renamed the JooJoo magic. Here is an article about the announcement with some pictures. (1/11 note: this device ultimately did not enter the market)

And finally, an October, 2009 run-down of the various e-Reader options by Technologizer.com can be found at:
http://technologizer.com/2009/10/26/the-e-reader-explosion-a-cheat-sheet/