2018 NCSC Viz-A-Thon Winners Announced

The 2018 NCSC Viz-A-Thon was held last week, and the winners were announced.  The Viz-A-Thon sought to find solutions to the complex court organizational charts that are part of the State Court Organization website.

“The judges were impressed with each of the Finalists. All the solutions thoughtfully explored the structure charts and considered users who need to investigate and explore the structures to understand the courts and guide research and decision making. The solutions were refreshing and creative and demonstrated that the participants thought about the data and the complicated “story” of state court structures.”

The winning team was “Team Bosphorus: Gunhan Pikdoken, Bahadir Cankardes, Emre K. Ar, Şuayip Ekmekci” who presented their solutions from Istanbul, Turkey.

The judges were impressed with the beautiful display that used white space well and easily allowed users to explore the similarities and differences of the state courts. The solution was a full-stack development using D3 and Vue. Team Bosphorus’s experience with UI and UX best practices was clear.”

You can see and test their working solution, along with those of the second and third place teams on the Viz-A-Thon website at:

https://www.ncsc.org/vizathon

Congratulations to all for great work and event.

Video Conferencing Technology in Pretrial Services

My NCSC colleague, Ms. Jannet Lewis has published an excellent case study on the use of secure video conferencing technology to assist in improving video conferencing communication in the Tenth Judicial Circuit, Polk County, Florida.

GDPR Guidance and How to Market Your Court Website

The COSCA/NACM Joint Technology Committee has recently released two new resource bulletins.  Details below…

This and That in Court Tech – September 2018

eCourts Conference

News on the eCourts 2018 conference, a new ODR pilot for small claims cases in Utah, security problems with the GovPayNow.com website, the IBM Watson AI based closed captioning system, and the UK Metropolitan Police developed mobile fingerprint system.

Smart Phones as Document Scanners for E-Filing

DIY iPhone Document Scanner

We received a question the other day about how to facilitate document/evidence E-filing?  And we first wrote about the use of smartphones for document capture back in 2014.  But after reviewing the article, it is time for an update.

Leveraging the Court Component Model to Connect Business and Technology

Our friends with the IJIS Institute Courts Advisory Committee have developed a web-based tool to help court practitioners find information about technology vendors and products that align with the Court Component Model.  Jenny Bunch of ImageSoft shared the following write-up on behalf of the IJIS Courts Advisory Committee . . . 

NCSC Announces Viz-a-thon Competition

The National Center for State Courts (NCSC) is hosting a virtual, multi-week contest to create a supportable, interactive, data visualization of the state court structure charts.  The Grand Prize for the winning entry is $5,000 USD and Runners-up will receive prizes totaling $3,500 USD.

More below...

Policy Recommendations on Public Use of Cell Phones in the Courthouse

Thanks to our good friend Marc Lauritsen’s tweet, we learned of the following press release and report from the Massachusetts Appleseed Center for Law and Justice on the impact of banning cell phones in courthouses.  More below…

This and That in Court Technology – August 2018

In this edition, we share news about eCourts 2018 conference, law enforcement body cameras, the 25th anniversary of PDF, and microfilm to digital conversion technology to write up while the software is installing on my new laptop. 

Court Case Management Systems Part 20: User Interface (UI) and More

https://goo.gl/UGJioL

In this long-delayed edition in the Court Case Management Systems (CCMS) series, we will discuss some thoughts on user interfaces (UI) for court systems.  It is an exciting time to explore this area because the technology is developing quickly, and there are many new possibilities for developers to consider.  And because of all the new developments, this article has been delayed many times.

But it is summer time and so it is time to dive in...

Note: Previous work by our colleagues at the NCSC and other experts provides the list of functionality (the what). This CCMS series has been our attempt to describe “how” technologies have been and could be used in the courts.  

Click here for the previous posts in this series.

North Carolina AOC Issues ICMS RFP

As part of the long-term eCourts vision, the North Carolina Administrative Office of the Courts (NCAOC) is seeking to procure a statewide ICMS. We request that all interested parties respond to the inquiries contained within this RFP by submitting a response by September 25, 2018.

Industry Summit, September 17-18, 2018, in St. Petersburg, Florida

We received the following conference announcement today.

The annual Industry Summit is an opportunity for industry technology leaders to engage in free-flowing discussion with leaders of COSCA, NACM, and CITOC, and representatives from the IJIS Institute, NCSC, and the Administrative Office of the United States Courts.  The objective of this two-day event is to provide the industry with insights into the current and emerging technology needs of the courts over the next two to six years.  Working side by side, court and industry technology leaders will identify business problems, brainstorm opportunities, and chart a course for future court technology.

Details below...

COSCA/NACM Joint Technology Committee Sets Priorities

In the recent committee meeting held in Atlanta, Georgia on July 22-23, 2018 the following priorities for 2018/2019 were set by the COSCA/NACM Joint Technology Committee.  The subjects are:

This and That in Court Tech – July 2018

Animal rescue at Rancho Del Sueno

We share news from California, a private court records access company, a huge report of technology projects from the Ohio state courts, and a commentary regarding a court in Michigan losing 3.6 million paper documents.

E-Filing Used for Theft and Some Remediation Ideas

Thanks to a message via ImageSoft, we learned of a Florida Bar News article describing how a law office manager used the system to “file papers in a foreclosure case” and then took $130,000 that was “left over after the foreclosure sale”.  We discuss the actions taken by the E-Filing Authority and more below…

Changing Frameworks – The Court Component Model and Agile Approaches

Graphic courtesy of Oriental Journal of Computer Science and Technology article "Component

Based Software Development Life Cycle Models: A Comparative Review" published 30-Jun-2017.

As promised in the recent post introducing the Court Component Model (CCM), some of our NCSC colleagues and partners will be sharing their perspectives on the CCM and ways it can be applied in real-world projects.

NCSC's very own Barb Holmes shares the following on her experiences working in the Pennsylvania Courts and how they combined a component-based approach with agile methods to tackle complex business problems and ever-changing requirements.

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Lessons on Court Public Access

Margaret Hagan, Director of the Legal Design Lab at Stanford University, posted a terrific article that summarizes the results of their policy lab course this spring on “Community-Led System Design Practice”.  The entire article is enlightening.  I will highlight some findings I found particularly interesting below.

Court Component Model - A Modular Approach to Court Applications

You've likely already heard about the Court Component Model (CCM). If not, please take a look at this JTC Resource Bulletin. It provides a great introduction to the model.

The Court Component Model has garnered much attention in recent months from courts and solution providers alike. It provides a relatively simple way of looking at logical groupings of functional capabilities specific to a court business function. Each grouping of capabilities can be implemented as a component that operates independently of other components but integrates with them via well-defined, standards-based interfaces.

A “Fiscal New Year Eve” Purchase Suggestion

There are only a couple of days left in many of our court’s fiscal year budgets.  So, for IT departments that sometimes mean a small "spending spree" to use the allocated funds.  I would like to suggest a small purchase that will benefit your computer video/audio communications setup.

This and That in Court Technology – June 2018

https://www.lawhelp.org/DC/

News about a national list of self-help court and public websites, lots of news about the upcoming E-Courts Conference, and tips for dealing with your email inbox.

Deleting Court Data

Recently I shared my opinion on a conference call that court IT systems (CMS/EDMS/E-filing) should not allow deletion of any data.  I explain below.

JTC Technology Update Webinar

The next National Association for Court Management webinar will be an update on the projects of the Joint Technology Committee. 

Court Administrators and Joint Technology Committee Co-chairs David Slayton and Kevin Bowling will give an update on the committee’s projects which include blockchain technology, cyber-security, redaction and many more.  These types of projects tend to set the agenda for court technology in the US for the next 5 years. 

The presentation will be made on Thursday, July 12, 2018, from 3:00 PM - 4:15 PM EDT

Digital Evidence Collection Standards

In the “missed an announcement in December category”, the US National Institute for Standards and Technology (NIST) released federated testing tools that are “designed to help law enforcement and forensic practitioners”…”in making a copy of the data from a seized electronic device”.

Since courts deal with evidence, we need to discuss this below…

This and That in Court Technology, May 2018

https://goo.gl/9BrHdZ

This month we learn about PatentBot, the new Oasis-Open LegalRuleML specification, some interesting thoughts on how to better replicate litigation service systems, Microsoft Research podcasts and free E-books, Oracle’s chatbot demonstration system, Notepad ++, and some graduation gift ideas.

Answering the Phone, with AI

I have often said that one of my goals in court automation was to be able to enable courts to “answer the phone”.  Many years ago, I was called by an elected clerk of court from a large metropolitan county.  Unfortunately, they did not leave a direct telephone number but rather, their general office number.  I tried to return the call and their automated answering system put me on hold.  I thought it was an important call to try to return and waited for over a half-hour.  Their system then disconnected me.  Frustration for me but it would have been worse to have business with this office.  So, when I saw the Google Duplex AI System demo, I became very interested.