Thursday September 24
This morning, a very interesting session on IT-supported self-help for self-representing litigants. What was still quite experimental two years ago is now becoming mainstream. The heart of it is the A2J author technology developed by Chicago-Kent Law School. It supports guiding users through question-and-answer sessions and it has reduced the time it takes for them to find something by more than half. The other place to go to on this topic is www.probono.net. It hosts support services for self-representing litigants, of which there are many right now, and expectations are that until 2013, even more people will be involved in lawsuits because of the economic crisis. www.nycourthelp.gov shows what the courts in New York State have done in the field of virtual self-help: on line forms that make parties think through their case, feed the case management system and generate a pleadings document, for eviction cases at first and now also for other frequently occurring cases.

Wednesday September 23
What is a good methodology for measuring judicial corruption? This was the question the Chief Justice of Iraq asked after my presentation on IT and Judicial Reform, this afternoon at CTC in Denver. Richard Van Duizend and Dan Hall of the National Center for State Courts and I presented on the role of IT in judicial reform in different parts of the world. NCSC has cooperated in the consortium that developed an international benchmarking system for court excellence. It is available on the Web at www.courtexcellence.com. Courts and court systems can evaluate themselves on a number of relevant areas, as a first step in an assessment and reform process. My own talk was a very brief overview of the conclusions of my dissertation. They concern the significance of court and case management systems for effective performance, and timely delivery in particular,, the role of the Internet in the courts’ shadow function as the guardian of the law, and on how to use IT as a means to reduce opportunities for corruption. Dan Hall, finally, gave an example of the courts in Minnesota here in the U.S. where they had used IT to reduce a need for staffing.
Actually, since the state courts are all losing funding because of the economic crisis, the theme of reducing staff by using IT runs through this conference. And although these is some advocacy for using the crisis for creative solutions, those solutions are few and far between. Incidentally, the answer to the Chief Justice’s question is that there are no accepted ways of measuring judicial corruption. There is the possibility of a public survey asking people about their perception of actual corruption, and there is the Transparency International Bribe Payers Index, but that does not target judges specifically. During question time, someone asked where she could buy my book. Not just yet, but ah, if only my publisher could hear this! I just realized I can now use my twitterpage @doryontour to announce publication, when it finally comes.

Tuesday afternoon: a discussion with other judges sharing ideas about the most pressing problems with regard to IT. My colleagues are refreshingly honest. In Japan, scanning is problematic because character recognition is not accurate enough for Japanese writing. Somewhere in the US, a case management systems is being developed for a six-judge court. All six are allowed to keep their own individual way of registering cases. The system is getting very expensive and it is taking a long time to build, and so it is technically out of date before it is fully implemented. E-filing is not sufficiently standardized to allow attorneys to file with different courts. Case management systems need to be replaced because the functionality is no longer enough. But how to make sure to get the right replacement? Another court has set up a self-help center for self-representing litigants, or pro-ses as the are called here. And then there is the court in Texas that has recently received some IT toys but does not yet know what to do with them.

Tuesday September 22
CTC2009 started officially this morning. There was a special welcome for the chief justice of Iraq, who is here with a delegation. The keynote speech was delivered by Ari Shapiro of National Public Radio, mainly about how courts can ensure serious reporting about justice can be done without extreme effort in the part of the press. With examples of Twitter, Facebook and some blogs, notably http://www.scotusblog.com/ he demonstrated how courts can ensure accurate information about what goes on in their courts: announcing important opinions being handed down (in Europe we would call that the pronouncement of a court decision) on Twitter that those interested can subscribe to, with links to the original documents, would be very helpful, Shapiro said. He cited an example of crowdsourcing on http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/. He closed by quoting Chief Justice John Roberts who, during the first phase of the nominations for a new justice earlier this year, confided that a new justice “is like an arranged marriage, you find someone you don’t know very well on your doorstep, and you have to live with them for the rest of your life”. Ari Shapiro has a page on http://www.npr.org/.

On Monday September 21 in the afternoon, the Federal Court in Denver hosted a meeting on the use of technology in the courtroom, and what courts’needs are. Marcia Krieger, the judge presiding over the meeting, remarked how in her courtroom, all participants in a trial were more or less arranged in a circle, which makes for more cooperative, less adversarial attitudes. This court has not gone completely paperless yet, since files still go to the appeal court on paper. Also, the record is still produced by a live court reporter, and not by audio or video recording. Marcia has three screens on her bench: on displaying evidence: one displaying the court record as it is being entered, and one for managing proceedings. The court does use remote connectivity to include witnesses, lawyers and other who are in far away locations in the proceedings, by phone or by video. It also uses an electronic organizer developed by the southern district of Texas, that has merged access to case documents, notes, instant messaging to law clerks, transcript access (Marcia did not manage displaying it, however) and access to Westlaw. In the ensuing discussion, there was a plea for more bandwidth on the remote technology. Another issue that is becoming more prominent is that of jurors using I-phones and social networking like Twitter from the jury box, creating a risk of mistrial and loss of resources. A plea for standard technical assistance in the courtroom was heard as well, so the judge does not have to manage all the controls, and summon assistance from elsewhere if something does not work.

Coffee meeting with Susanne Hoogwater, who has her own firm in visualizing legal information. We met through LinkedIn, which is saying something about Web 2.0. We talked for nearly two hours, about her work and about mine and my research. Our common ground is accessible legal information. We agreed the potential of the Internet as identified by Richard Susskind: helping informal settlement by providing “golden nuggets of legal information” will apply mainly to people with at least some secondary education. Legal institutions will have to package their information in such a way that it is easily understood by those who have some secondary education. Putting the law on line is not going to help. Those with a really low level of education will still need someone to sort out their shoe boxes of papers, so to speak. We also agreed that confidence is an important component of the communication about legal information. In my research, I have scored web sites for effectiveness, and that includes whether the reader can be confident that, if they act as instructed, will get the result they are after. Thank you, Susanne, for a copy of your book Beeldtaal voor Juristen, about graphic models for making legal information more accessible, and for an inspiring morning.

We - well, I do - forget how quickly technological developments are changing the way we live. In 2001, with CTC in Baltimore, Wim and I did a camping tour along the East coast of the U.S. We read our email in the local public libraries, a great free service. Eight years later, we travel with our notebook computers and have free wifi in all motels. We still go camping, and then we just park near a motel for wifi service. Clearly, we do not make electronic payments over open wireless, but otherwise it is very handy. There will be free wifi at CTC in Denver too.
Wim keeps track of his photo sales, and I have composed my presentation for CTC while we were in Yellowstone National Park which does not provide any kind of connectivity whatsoever. But I sat in a lobby with a view of Old Faithful Geyser for a couple of hours and moved and pasted my slides. As I closed my notebook, Old Faithful gracefully erupted. Awesome.
We also bought a satellite navigation system (a tom-tom) to experiment with while driving. It was $ 129 at WalMart. And as things go, the function we use most is not the one it was designed for, but something else: that of keeping track of maximum speed. It shows you the maximum speed and beeps when you drive too fast. It also finds us hotels and restaurants. We will bring it home and download the European maps. However, we still have lots of paper maps and would not know how to travel without them.

CTC

The 2009 Court Technology Conference will be held in Denver, Colorado September 22-24. Check out the program here.
I attended CTC for the first time in 1999, in Los Angeles, and have attended all of them (five in all) since then. They are organized by the National Center for State Courts in the U.S., and they are always an interesting mix of experience sharing, highlighting new issues and reactions to present-day problems.
This year's program focuses on keeping things going in difficult times, but it also has Ari Shapiro National Public Radio's justice expert in the opening keynote. There is always the election of the best court web site. I meet friends and colleagues at the special interest group for judges. Another of my favorite items is Fred Lederer's court technology lab.
My plan is to do a blog on the conference every day. My twitterpage @doryontour will announce the program items during the course of the day. So, keep coming back here, and also let me know what you think by sending comments.

One of my projects right now is to think about IT in courts in 2020. The Dutch judiciary is doing some brain storming on the future, and this will be input for some of the sessions. In 2002, we made some projections about court IT in 2008. So I started out by revisiting our 2002 projections for 2008 to see what had been realized. Workplace on line access to sources of legal information (jurisprudence, laws and legislation history) for judges and court staff, and nationwide coordination the case load of large criminal cases are both a reality in 2008. The plan for a single case registration system? Nope! Practically all the other projections depended on the new case registration system being in place, so the list of successes is short.
Dutch courts are not at the forefront of IT development in Europe, according to the latest report from CEPEJ. The Commission Européenne pour l'Efficacité de la Justice has gathered information about court operations since 2002. The results show how a few countries have actually managed to leverage IT to transform their court processes: the UK, Finland and Austria are examples. The second echelon are able to use the Internet for informal email and for finding information, but not to interact with court users. Interaction would require changes in processes that are hard to achieve. Right now, we can only speculate about the reasons: formal legal requirements (can they be deformalized?), security needs (is that high security level really necessary?), lack of experience with electronic information processing (do we need more experimentation?). And most importantly: how can we learn from the others?
Keep watching this space, these issues will be explored here.

Welcome to my blog!

Reviving this blog was one of my resolutions. Long overdue, but now finally realized. This blog will share discoveries and some results of my ongoing research.

A lot has happened since that lonely blog was uploaded in 2003.

Early in 2004, I moved to the U.S. when the World Bank hired me as a senior judicial reform expert. My main tasks were sharing my experience as IT program manager and Information Manager for the Netherlands judiciary, in projects, training and knowledge generation. In 2007, I came back to the Netherlands. Supported by the Netherlands Judicial Council, and building on all that experience, I am presently working on a doctoral dissertation on information technology and judicial reform. Sharing my experience has always been a great pleasure.

This blog will share some of the vast amount of stuff I learned during all those extremely interesting years, as well as newly emerging insights.

Brave New Cybercourt (1)

Governor John Engler of Michigan put his state squarely on the Brave New Cybermap: Michigan has the world’s first cybercourt. Or does it? And if so, what of it? Does it do us any good?

The court was created by legislation passed in December 2001, which became law on January 9, 2002. Here is the press release on the signing of the law. Electronic document filing, Web-based conferencing and virtual courtrooms would be part of the cybercourt. This would reduce travel time and costs and resolve disputes relatively quickly. The initiative was heralded in the press.

Let’s take a closer look at the portal for the court.
In the Michigan cybercourt, a judge (no jury will be involved) will hear business and commercial cases in which the amount in dispute exceeds $25,000. Decisions can be appealed to the (noncyber) Court of Appeals. The court's jurisdiction is concurrent with that of other courts. The plaintiff can therefore choose whether or not to sue in the virtual court. Any defendant who objects to the case having been filed in the cybercourt can seek to remove the case to the ordinary court.. The dispute must be within the jurisdiction of a Michigan State Court. Any dispute arising that crosses the boundaries of the state of Michigan would have to be heard by a noncyber federal court.
Lawyers will be able to file their briefs online, argue their cases and appear in court via videoconference, and present evidence via streaming audio and video. Cybercourt judges will be trained in the use of the latest technology.

Comments in the legal press and welcome the idea of appearing in court while not in court. Somehow, they like the idea of appearing in court in their pajama’s! On the other hand, they say it's hard to envision how any proceeding that takes place online could adequately replace the face-to-face closeness of a physical courtroom. A witness' testimony is often more important than mere words, and body language surely can't be read as well in two dimensions, regardless of how advanced streaming technology becomes. And, although many Internet cases involve technologies that can be displayed online, how could a cybercourt allow a judge or jury to physically examine a piece of hardware that might be vital to a case. In how many cases does that really happen? The cybercourt website does not tell us. We keep searching. In our search, we will circle the globe, keep watching this space!

The Singapore Subordinate Courts deal with a considerable number of e-commerce cases. They offer mediation as part of their service. They feel that reconciliation and cooperation is part of their culture, rather than adversarial, contradictory proceedings in the Western tradition. Mediation is generally held to be a practical way of dealing with disputes between parties who have to continue their relationship. Go here to see for yourself. The mediation process is conducted via e-mail. Its outcome is a settlement of the dispute by the parties. If not, formal action can be filed.
E-mail is very low-tech compared to the snazzy stuff of the Michigan cybercourt. And yet, it is sufficient to support mediation. 5.000 e-commerce cases were mediated in 2001, and more than 9.000 in 2002, according to the annual report of the courts. Frankly, one of the good things about the Singapore courts is that we can find these data without difficulty.

How much do we need high tech dispute resolution support? The Netherlands judiciary deals with a little over 300.000 commercial cases each year. More than 70 % are uncontested small claims. Witness hearings are conducted in less than 3 % of all cases. So, a little technology can go a long way.