Wednesday, December 20, 2017

New York State Courts Announce High-Tech Courtrooms



Via two press releases this month, we learn about new high-tech courtrooms in the New York City Family Court  location in Brooklyn and in  Westchester County Supreme Court in White Plains, New York

More below...



Wednesday, December 13, 2017

Structuring Court Communications with an App



Courts are different than many other businesses or services.  A rather obvious statement I know.  But a very important difference is that we have very formal court rules and legal statutes that create the steps, as well as boundaries, in how information is presented.  The rules also determine how the courts evaluate the completeness and truthfulness of the information presented.  Because of these structures and rules, I have been very cautious about the court's use of social media that as we know, have very few if any rules.

But communication is hard for many people.  This is especially true for communication that is structured to persuade or argue a point of view or law.  Therefore, an app that helps people, especially the self-represented litigants to accomplish this, is of great interest to me.



Friday, December 1, 2017

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 



Monday, November 20, 2017

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.



Wednesday, November 15, 2017

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.


Wednesday, November 8, 2017

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...


Friday, November 3, 2017

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.



Thursday, October 19, 2017

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:




Thursday, October 12, 2017

Thursday, October 5, 2017

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.


Friday, September 29, 2017

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…


Thursday, September 21, 2017

A Special Court Technology Procurement Workshop




A special 1 1/2 day Technology Procurement Workshop for Court Leaders and Technology Staff, Vendors, and Consultants will be presented in Phoenix, Arizona, November 7-8, 2017 at the Trial Court Education Center, Superior Court of Arizona in Maricopa County.

More below...