Thursday, August 5, 2021

This and That in Court Technology, August 2021

 


In this month’s collection of notes we have news about an online forms creation website, punishment for abuse of social media by posting a judge's personal information, ideas for "engineering gatherings", New Mexico finishing their statewide E-filing implementation project, the new NCSC's Courthouse Retrospective report, CCJ/COSCA support for remote and virtual hearings, and a cool new data tool.



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Suffolk Law School Forms Creation Online

Our friend Professor Quinten Steenhuis (and BTW a good Twitter follow @QSteenhuis) posted that they have made 31 updates to their CDC eviction moratorium tool that is part of their Court Forms Online project at the LegalInnovation and Technology Lab.  

The website is at: https://courtformsonline.org/  

I would encourage courts to work with the law schools in their state as Suffolk has with the Massachusetts Trial Court.

Social Media and Judge Security

Via legal tech journalist Nichole Black’s ( https://twitter.com/nikiblack ) Twitter feed and press release we learned that Twitter can be dangerous to one’s freedom when abused.  A press release from the United States Attorney’s Office in the Western District of Pennsylvania said:

“PITTSBURGH - A resident of Paramus, New Jersey, pleaded guilty and was sentenced in federal court in relation to a charge of making restricted information publicly available, Acting United States Attorney Stephen R. Kaufman announced today.

William Kaetz, age 56, pleaded guilty to one count before United States District Judge J. Nicholas Ranjan.

In connection with the guilty plea, the court was advised that on October 18, 2020, Kaetz publicly posted the home address of a United States District Court Judge to the social media sites Facebook and Twitter, and did so with the intent to threaten or intimidate, or with the intent and knowledge that others would use the information to threaten or intimidate, said judge.

Following the guilty plea hearing, Judge Ranjan sentenced Kaetz to a term of imprisonment of 16 months, with three years’ supervised release and a fine of $5,000.”

Engineering Gatherings

Another friend, Professor Cat Moon Tweeted: “So heartened that author/podcaster Priya Parker https://twitter.com/priyaparker  shares a story about reinventing "gatherings" in *a courthouse* at the very beginning of her wonderful book The Art of Gathering.”  This excellent book  “delivers formulas for better get-togethers”.  While this is not technology, it is critical for how we use technology for in-person and virtual meetings to achieve their purpose.

https://www.amazon.com/Art-Gathering-How-Meet-Matters/dp/1594634920

https://www.npr.org/2021/07/13/1015799443/hosting-gathering-dinner-party-how-to-tips-checklist

New Mexico Magistrate (Limited Jurisdiction) E-filing Implemented

Via press release on July 27, 2021

SANTA FE — Attorneys can now electronically file civil lawsuits in magistrate courts across New Mexico.

“Electronic filing benefits all New Mexicans because it improves the efficiency of our courts,” Chief Justice Michael E. Vigil said.

E-filing allows litigants to submit digital documents instead of paper and, if they choose, to electronically deliver copies to other parties in the case. Attorneys are able to conveniently initiate civil lawsuits and file subsequent documents in cases without traveling to a magistrate court.

This saves time for attorneys and their staff. E-filing streamlines court operations because staff no longer must convert paper documents from attorneys into a digital format for the computerized case management system used to docket and process cases.

The final phase of a statewide implementation of e-filing in magistrate courts was completed when the service became available Monday, July 26”…

“E-filing and service of documents occurs through the online File & Serve system, which is used by attorneys for civil and criminal cases in district courts, civil cases in the Bernalillo County Metropolitan Court, all case types in the Court of Appeals and nearly all case types in the state Supreme Court.”

Retrospective of Courthouse Design

The NCSC has released online "The Retrospective of Courthouse Design 2011-2020," report which highlights and illustrates the architectural innovations designed to accommodate evolving judicial work environments over the past decade.  There is a section on how technology has been used in these courthouses.  Read the publication online here: http://ow.ly/iVEi50FGzCB

Conference of Chief Justices & COSCA Support Remote and Virtual Hearings

A resolution at the 2020 Annual meeting stated in part:

NOW, THEREFORE, BE IT RESOLVED, the Conference of Chief Justices and the Conference of State Court Administrators urge their members to apply the guiding principles for court technology to remote and virtual hearings and support technology innovations to facilitate access to justice, so that all court users get the help they need and are treated with dignity. 

Because virtual and remote hearings can pose challenges, courts are encouraged to consider:

1) Ensuring that all users, even those with difficulty using technology or who do not have access to reliable internet with necessary bandwidth, can still participate. This may require offering the option to appear in person or remotely, the provision of technology or access points in the court and community, and flexibility in allowing a video participant to transition to voice only, other adaptations caused by bandwidth or technology problems.  

2) Making adjustments and being sensitive to privacy issues arising from court users having to appear remotely from a public or non-private space.

3) Carefully considering what case types and hearing types are appropriate for virtual hearings and which are not. 

4) Ensuring that all parties to a dispute—regardless of English proficiency, disability, socio-economic status or whether they are self-represented—can meaningfully participate in court processes.

5) Adjusting the scheduling of hearings to allow adequate time to orient people and to handle any technology issues. Virtual hearings may take more or less time than in-person hearings and hearings that are hybrid, with people in person and virtually appearing, may require more time to set up and manage; and 

To me, #4 is the most important one… justice accessibility.

A Beautiful Power Tool to Scrape, Clean, and Combine Data

One of my favorite tech columnists, Jon Udell writes:

Labels like “data scientist” and “data journalist” connote an elite corps of professionals who can analyze data and use it to reason about the world. There are elite practitioners, of course, but since the advent of online data a quarter-century ago I’ve hoped that every thinking citizen of the world (and of the web) could engage in similar analysis and reasoning.

That’s long been possible for those of us with the ability to wrangle APIs and transform data using SQL, Python, or another programming language. But even for us it hasn’t been easy.

All the ingredients are lying around in plain sight, but the effort required to combine them winds up being more trouble than it’s worth. And that’s for me, a skilled longtime scraper and transformer of web data. For you — even if you’re a scientist or a journalist! — that may not even be an option.

Enter Workbench, a web app with the tagline: “Scrape, clean, combine and analyze data without code.” I’ve worked with tools in the past that pointed the way toward that vision. DabbleDB in 2005 (now gone) and Freebase Gridworks in 2010 (still alive as Open Refine) were effective ways to cut through data friction. Workbench carries those ideas forward delightfully. It enables me to fly through the boring and difficult stuff — the scraping, cleaning and combining — in order to focus on what matters: the analysis.

https://workbenchdata.com/

For my techno-geek friends… this is interesting?

 

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August image from: https://pngtree.com/so/august.png/ 


 




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