Webinar: How to Incorporate Plain Language into Court Forms, Websites, and Other Materials

The National Association for Court Management, in partnership with the Self-represented Litigation Network (SRLN), presented its third webinar of 2017 on November 29, 2017.

Fortunately for those of us who missed the live event, they have saved the slides and recording at https://www.srln.org/node/1313 

Oregon eCourt: A Technology and Business Success Story

Brookings, Oregon from:
http://visittheoregoncoast.com/

While researching last week’s article on E-filing implementation statistics I ran across the 2016 Annual Report of the Oregon Judicial Branch titled: Focus on Technology.  It was a great surprise to find sixteen pages were devoted to a detailed report of their eCourt project with the following section headings:

• Project background and approach
• Developing user buy-in
• The project’s guiding principles
• How they conducted planning, law, and policy workshops
• Vendor selection and contracting
• Work with the legislature
• External stakeholder buy-in
• User project participation and training
• Integrations and implementation
• Implementation of lessons learned from the courts
• What “worked well” to make the Oregon eCourt project a success
• Current benefits from the Oregon eCourt System
• Public access and statewide mandatory eFiling
• Going forward – Continuing development

I believe that this report should be mandatory reading for all court technologists.  Congratulations and well done Oregon Judicial Branch.

It is available for download in PDF here.

Millions and Millions Served

An original McDonald's Restaurant

When I was young, the US fast food restaurant, McDonald’s would display that they had sold over 1 million and later 2 million hamburgers (see picture at the left).  Court E-filing has been like that.  Slow adoption at first.  But now after 20 years, there are now millions of E-filings recorded.

Microsoft/Legal Aid Tech/Voice-Response Portals

There is so much to this story I couldn’t really write a title that reflected all of the exciting news.  We learned that Microsoft is currently investing in applying their new AI enabled voice-response technology to the problem of legal aid for the disadvantaged.  They have engaged with our friends and experts in the subject at the Legal Services Corporation and Probono.net. Much more below...

Problems and Solutions for Court Videoconferencing

A BuzzFeed News article brought to our attention a report done on the use of videoconferencing in the Courts of the United Kingdom and Wales.  We share some notes from the articles and discuss our potential technology solutions and other resources below.

Guidelines for Portable Communication Devices

On September 12, 2017, in the news release, the US Federal Courts announced guidance on the use of these devices in courthouses.  The document, in particular, discusses the use of devices by the media.  More below.

Clerk Bot

Craig Van Brussel, Chief Technology Officer in the First Judicial District of Florida shared news about their testing of “Robotic Process Automation” that was developed by Computing Systems Innovations (CSI) in Orlando.  More below:

Court Cyber Security Risk Discussed

After the great CTC keynote address on cyber-security I had some thoughts on what are the court’s actual areas of vulnerability.  That and information about a nice PDF converter utility below:

This and That in Court Technology – October, 2017

News from the California courts, digital recording technology advances, smartphone language interpretation, the NCRA, Social Security Number replacement, Mississippi court rules, a conference in New Zealand and a useful Dutch Legal Technology newsletter/blog, and a good CTC 2017 summary.

LegalXML Electronic Court Filing Specification 5.0 Draft Announced

In the first major update since 2013, the Oasis-Open LegalXML Electronic Court Filing (ECF) Technical Committee has announced version 5 for sixty-day public review.  Since the standard is the most widely used electronic filing standard, this is a significant advancement. 

More below…