This and That in Court Tech – February, 2016

Time again for another installment of “This and That”.  We have news about Legal Services Corporation grants, Baton Rouge Louisiana Family Court self-help website, US Federal Court law library changes, an article from Harvard Business Review, Microsoft releasing to open source artificial intelligence framework software, widely varying software licensing costs for police in the UK, and the CTB listed as one of the 50 must read blogs by State Tech Magazine.

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Wanted: Competitors for Inaugural CourtHack

NCSC is sponsoring the first-ever CourtHack—a 30-hour hackathon—designed to develop new and innovative solutions to improve our nation’s court systems. CourtHack takes place March 4-5, 2016 at the Matheson Courthouse in Salt Lake City, Utah.

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Microsoft Ends Older Internet Explorer Browser Support

Because the majority of our CTB readers use this browser, we recommend that you should plan to update or change in the very near future.

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McMillan Award 2015 Finalist – Cynthia Marr

L to R: Cynthia Marr, Audrey Jun, and Chris Lundquist

In the third of three articles recognizing McMillan Award finalists, we present Ms. Cynthia Marr, Analytic Support Manager, Pierce County District Court in the State of Washington and their online customer service  improvement program.

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An Interview with ProBono.net’s Claudia Johnson

Left to Right: Xander Karsten, Claudia Johnson,
and Liz Keith of Probono.net

One of our good friends in the court/justice technology business, Ms. Claudia Johnson of ProBono.net was recently interviewed.

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The interview was conducted by Mr. Stanley Ramdhany, a senior at Columbia University majoring in Sociology with a particular interest in the field of law and society.

He writes:

“In the field of public interest work, Claudia Johnson is renowned as one of the first law professionals to address the union between technology and legal aid.  On the topic of how she first entered the field, Claudia stated, “I decided to go to law school at U Penn, and there I fell in love with public interest work, by working with DV victims in Northern Philadelphia. At this point, I was very interested in national origin discrimination and LEP advocacy, so I did my Skadden Fellowship on language access for Medicaid/disabled communities with focus on LEP groups.”  It was there that Claudia first focused on the union of legal services and technology:  “I wanted to have a way to track patterns by health care plan, zip code, and client demographics. So I was looking for a relatable multidimensional database—in 1997. That did not exist in legal services, so we had to build our own.”

Click here for the full in-depth interview (and in my opinion it is a good read to learn about this amazing lady)

An Interview with TestNotice’s John Coggeshall

From time to time we here at the CTB want to make our readers aware of new products and services. In this post we talk with John Coggeshall, Co-Founder of TestNotice that provides notification services for drug and problem solving courts.  The service also has other potential uses.

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New South Wales Australia Announces Online Court Project

Sydney, Australia Opera House
Photo by DAVID ILIFF.
License: CC-BY-SA 3.0

Via press release: Wednesday, 9 September 2015

Access to justice will be faster, easier and cheaper with the pilot of the State’s first Online Court, Attorney General Gabrielle Upton today announced.

The Online Court will initially be used for civil cases in the Local Court General Division and will eliminate the need for legal practitioners to attend pre-trial hearings in court.
Ms Upton said the use of online legal services which will improve access to justice and ensure services meet people’s expectations.

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Ms. Audrey Jun Receives First McMillan Award

At CTC-2015, Ms. Audrey Jun from Courthouse Libraries BC (see bio below) received the first James E. McMillan Award (McMillan Award) for Innovation in Court Technology for their Clicklaw system.  An extract from her submission is shown below.  A full version of her paper is also available by clicking here.

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Courts are reinventing for the 21st Century

A guest post by Judge Dawn Kilda, 74th District Court in Bay County, Michigan.on how technology implementation benefits her court.

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This and That in Court Technology – September, 2015

This month we have news and notes about a crowdsourcing funding project, advances in artificial intelligence powered speech recognition, criminal case E-filing in Illinois, some comments about the new Apple's iPad Pro and Pencil, a new tiny cheap computer, IBM pitches Watson to trial lawyers, solar windows, and cleaning your gadgets.

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User Interface Changes – Are They Worth It?

I read a terrific blog post last month regarding the problems that result when websites or computer applications change their user interfaces.  We discuss below.

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This and That in Court Technology – August, 2015

Lots of news for a hot and sticky summer week from Pennsylvania, Open Law Labs, Adobe, Washington DC, Arizona, Nebraska, and fun tech toy land.

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An early July, 2015 edition of This and That in Court Technology

A summer Iowa corn field

Lots and lots to share including news from Iowa, Texas, Arkansas,  US Federal Court’s OSCAR system, a new records management app, and tips for “mobile warriors”.

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Rwanda Court Pre-Filing E-Filing System

Chief Justice of Rwanda, Prof. Sam Rugege

Earlier this year I visited the courts in Kigali, Rwanda.  They showed me their E-filing system that I didn’t really understand until now.

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Smart Forms – Helping the Self-Represented, Helping the Courts

One of the things that we teach here at the NCSC is that court internet web services need to be oriented to the user’s requirements. And, in turn control how information is presented for adjudication. Smart Forms provide one successful approach to address this need.

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The Hagan Manifesto on PDF's

Used with permission from Ms. Hagan

Our favorite Law Design blogger, Ms. Margaret Hagan, has posted her “short manifesto” on “Law’s PDF Problem”.  I agree with her observations and offer some additional commentary.

Ms. Hagan is doing some excellent work in examining how legal systems have been designed (or not designed) over the past few years.  Her recent post looks at the problem of legal (including court) information being “buried in PDF’s”.  She notes:

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This and That in Court Technology – December, 2014

Nevada Chief Justice Mark Gibbons

Notes and article links about E-Courts, Wearable Evidence in courts, a settlement about inaccurate court data in a credit bureau, monitor twisting, smartphone driver’s licenses, a “Moneyball” approach to crime prosecution, E-filing at Michigan appellate courts, the Texas Bar online legal education website, Ms. Sharon Nelson, and upcoming conferences in this month's This and That.

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E-Filing Benefits are Hard to Quantify

With E-courts 2014 coming next week, we share some thoughts on the difficulty in quantifying the benefits of E-filing.

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US Federal Courts Data Conversion Explained

Many of you may have read about the controversy regarding some of the US Federal Courts "losing" PACER case file information.  Fortunately, the Wall Street Journal clarifies.

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A Huge End of August 2014 This and That in Court Tech

Lots of news from and for our court and justice corner of the technology universe.

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