CTC2015 Day 3

CTC's Day 3 brought the last installment in the track on tools for 21st century judges, but it was actualy about something else. The number of cases in the civil courts is going down, ODR numbers are growing. The US courts have thought about this, and come up with a report on possible solutions. And since technology affects everything, there is a lot of technology in the report.

The panel members were all asked to present their perspective, and prioritize the technology that they felt was most important. For the judge on the panel, it was case management; her insight was that case management is not document management, but actually bringing cases forward. Cases may not all be the same but they are like snowflakes: they are all white, and if there are a lot of them you need to get out of the way, they're just snow.
Push notifications were the favorite of the court manager. The courts CIO's priority was in litigation platforms. His point: courts need to become more user-centric. He referred to the Rechtwijzer 2.0, a site developed by the Dutch Legal Aid Board for couples who want to arrange their own divorce, which he found really cool.

For me, one key question remains: what is the reform going to achieve? Are the courts going to try and retain the segment of cases that is now increasingly handled by private ODR? Will they decide that the courts' core business is resolving disputes that do not have a predictable outcome, as Stephen Breyer, justice in the US Supreme Court once said?

In the endnote, the presenters observed how more and more judges are getting involved. Because my focus was on tools for 21st century judges, I had to miss out on a lot of interesting stuff, like social media and how courts use them and - my other favorite - access to justice. Fortunately, most of the presentations are on line, and sessions were streamed as well, all to be found on ctc2015.org. NCSC, with their limited means, have put together a very interesting, and for the courts, challenging conference. I look forward to CTC2017 in Salt Lake City. 

Day 2: apps, online forms and more judicial tools

Day 2 started with the Midnote. Tara Thomas talked about a lot of apps and their pros and cons. Apps for time saving, for project management, for calendars, conference calls, information sharing, cloud storage of documents. Members of the audience shared their experience with using some of them.

Collin County in Texas shared their own experience in going more paperless. Great insight: electronic document means no more copies, it is always the original. Court staff learned that putting two copies of a document in an electronic case file is unnecessary. 

Williamson County Court judge Bill Gravell explained how they use online forms for self-representing litigants to file their case. The court went from processing 45-50 cases per day to 100, handling time was reduced from 20 minutes to 10 minutes, and instead of 2 jury trials in a day they could now handle jury trials. As cases came to trial faster, defendants chose more often to plead guilty, and the court could drop the jury trial. Bill then introduced me to the people at Tyler Technologies who developed the forms. Tyler actually developed an engine that courts can use to generate their own forms, since they all have different requirements. The engine is a really useful tool. After lunch, I turned my attention to judicial tools again. Three IT staff from Missouri, Wisconsin and Utah shared their experience on developing tools for judges. They had all developed screens with panels presenting different kinds of information: a calendar, pending tasks, quick links to research tools and to Word. Wisconsin gave the judges a private, confidential view of their own statistics: cases pending, cases resolved, that sort of thing. At first, some judges did not want to see it and asked the IT staff to take the panel away. It stayed.

CTC2015 opened on Tuesday morning with a keynote by Mark Britton, CEO of AVVO a platform for legal advice and services. His job was to shake the audience out of any complacency they may have had: the customers are dissatisfied, they are finding other ways to resolve their disputes, your monopoly is not going to help.
The image projected by the movie The Net is that of fear of having personal information on the Internet making you vulnerable to terrorist who want to use it to kill you. 
With Japanese cars and transistor radios for an analogy, he showed how technology disrupts from the consumer up: a new product, for new consumer market: Modria, building an ADR platform, document assembly services like legalzoom; how non-profit legal services are a viable possibility.
Note from the audience: Modria also built a support web site for couples wanting to have an amicable divorce for the Dutch Legal Aid Board.

The Judicial Tools Maturity Model was, for me, the most interesting finding of Day 1. It shows how a court or a judge can grow from paper-based to basic, then to intermediate to an advanced level of IT use. I expect we can use it to test all following presentations on tools for the 21st century judge by their maturity level in the model. From what I saw, the Minnesota courts are moving up in the charts, and the Missouri courts are doing it much more slowly.  

CTC 2015, Minneapolis, Sept 22-24

The 2015 Court Technology Conference is about to start, on Tuesday, September 22. The venue this year is Minneapolis, Minnesota in the United States. This blog is the first of my usual CTC blogs for this year. Keep watching this space for more every conference day. This time, my interest in court technology is even more urgent than in past years. As the product owner of the Netherlands' courts digitalization of the civil procedure, I am acutely aware how difficult developing court IT is. So, I look towards US courts for experience on developing court IT.

Tools for 21st century judges 
The educational track on tools for 21st century judges caught my eye right away. It promises to explore technology tools that can assist judges in making the transition from paper case files to an electronic bench. This transition is very complex as well as critical to maintaining court performance.

Access to justice
Next, I'm always interested in access to justice. As my colleague Martin Gonzales warned repeatedly at CTC2013, more and more people are forced to represent themselves for lack of legal aid. So how can e-filing help self-representing litigants? What other examples do US courts have?

Keynote on Innovation 
The first keynote will address the Innovation Imperative. Mark Britton, founder and CEO of the world's largest community for legal guidance and services, will address innovation. Courts' primary role is to guard the existing legal order. This makes innovation a particular challenge for courts. This keynote opens the conference on Tuesday morning. The keynotes and a lot of other sessions will be streamed live.
Click here for the program: http://www.ctc2015.org 

Flying can be risky

In the last week of August 2015, The European Study Group on Pubic Administration (EGPA) met in Toulouse, France. Eighteen study groups exchange their latest research every year. I presented in the Justice and Court Administration group. Over three days, more than fifteen speakers treated us to a variety of research findings. Amazing, all the things one can research. Some highlights.

Ukraine
Two interesting contributions from Ukraine, both from the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) Fair Justice project. Olga Nikolaieva presented her research on improving alternative dispute resolution in commercial disputes. Sergii Suchenko described how a system for measuring judges ‘workload is being developed, in order to distribute resources better and also to evaluate judges‘ performance.
Sylwia Moravska (Gdansk, Poland) told us how she tries to make court staff treat court users more courteously. She found it hard to answer questions about the goal of her attempt.
   

Knowledge sharing
Knowledge sharing was a hot topic. Jose Ferretti from Brasilia, Brazil gave a presentation that made most of us think: I don’t get it, but I sense he is on to something he cannot yet express in words. That was no knowledge sharing just yet. Sandra Taal from the Netherlands had used her data from other research to test if there are relevant differences in the way men and women share knowledge. There is, but the explanation is rather in women’s more social behavior.

Switzerland
In Switzerland there is some surprising, interesting research.  For instance into the emerging paralegals/legal support staff hire to keep on top of a growing work load. Does it lead to paralegal-justice without access to a judge? Another example: Courts in Switzerland are usually quite small, and they need to deal with different stakeholders, both inside and outside the courts. I had never really thought about this but come to think of it, I recognized some similarities. And then there was the research about regional differences, though to be really large in Switzerland, with all those cantons, languages and cultures. The configurations were different than expected. This research originated because the courts would not participate in it. And now it has been done, they do not want it published.

Finally: Netherlands
in the Netherlands, there is also some interesting research going on. Jos Hoevenaars (Nijmegen) presented his PhD research into the use of the preliminary reference procedure in immigration law. It could produce case law, but it is expensive and it takes a long time. Kars de Graaf and Bert Marseille (Groningen) tested the reasoning behind a proposed law to restructure the system of administrative courts of appeal in the Netherlands. Frans van Dijk, director of the Netherlands Judicial Council, presented a survey by the European Network of Judicial Councils into the perception of judges and citizens of the independence of courts and judges. Independence is perceived most in Denmark, but otherwise, results vary considerably. The image of – for instance – the courts in Poland is very poor.  This survey has produces a lot of data that can keep researchers busy for years to come. The data are open, and so is the report. Finally, I presented the way the courts in the Netherlands attempt to apply lessons from earlier IT-projects in Europe. The key is to manage complexity in all domains by keeping everything as simple as possible. I expect our lessons can be of use to other countries. More knowledge sharing.

Flying can be risky
There were seventeen other study groups. Virtually all those who research public administration in the Netherlands flew back on the same flight. Quite a risk for public administration in the Netherlands.