International Conference on Electronic Litigation 2011

The Singapore Academy of Law are organising the “International Conference on Electronic Litigation 2011” in Singapore this August. The Organizing Committee has extended a very warm invitation to attend the Conference which will be held on 11 and 12 August 2011 at the Marina Mandarin Hotel, Singapore.

The Conference will feature two keynote speakers, Lord Justice Rupert Jackson of the Court of Appeal in the UK and Judge of Appeal Justice V K Rajah of the Supreme Court of Singapore. The key objective of the Conference is to gather legal luminaries from all over the world to discuss and confer on international developments in electronic litigation. These include electronic discovery, electronic hearings, the preservation of electronic evidence and the duty on litigants and lawyers to preserve such evidence. Other topics in this rapidly evolving area of the law include a discussion on recent developments in computer forensics and common issues faced by computer forensic experts. Judges, legal practitioners, in-house counsel and academics from all over the world will be invited to attend the Conference. Speakers and panelists will be drawn from the Judiciary, the legal industry and academia to represent a full range of views.

New Hampshire Seeks E-Courts Staff

The New Hampshire Administrative Office of the Courts have posted two job announcements.

The first announcement (pdf) is for a two year appointment as the E-Courts Project Manager.

And the second job posting (pdf) is a one year appointment for an E-Courts Statutes/Rules Analyst.

For additional information, a summary of the courts 2010-2012 Information Technology Plan (pdf) can be viewed/downloaded by clicking here.

NIEM Children, Youth, and Family Services Domain Draft Released

The governance team of the National Information Exchange Model's Children, Youth, and Family Services Domain (NIEM CYFS) invites you to review and critique its new schema.  We appreciate your feedback and ask that you send your comments to dgraski@ncsc.org by July 15, 2011.

The beta version of CYFS 2.1.1 can be viewed in several formats.  For a comprehensive list of all of the elements (properties), types, and code lists (enumerations), this html view works best:  http://www.waterholesoftware.com/downloads/cyfs211/cyfs211.html.  Several other tools found at http://cyfsdomain.org enable keyword searches and graphical views (e.g., NIEM Wayfarer).

The purpose of the CYFS domain is to support timely, complete, accurate, and efficient information sharing among the child support, child welfare, juvenile justice, family court, and related partners that can help improve outcomes for children and youth whose circumstances make them particularly vulnerable.  The inaugural content for the domain – part of NIEM 2.1’s release in September 2009 – was extracted from extension schema specifying national reference models for six data exchanges between courts and child-support enforcement agencies, and between courts and child welfare agencies.  The CYFS Domain release planned for August 2011 will integrate the Juvenile Justice XML data model developed by the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention’s Juvenile Information Sharing Initiative.  In addition, the August 2011 domain update will include data elements from three notification exchanges (court event, representation, and placement change).

The National Judicial-Child Support Task Force, sponsored by the Department of Health and Human Services’ Administration for Children and Families’ Office of Child Support Enforcement (OCSE), developed two information exchange models using NIEM’s predecessor, the Global Justice XML Data Model.  The Task Force included representatives from state and tribal CSE agencies and courts, staff from OCSE’s regional and central offices, and the National Center for State Courts (NCSC).  The Initial Request for Remedy IEPD describes the agency’s case-initiation message to the court; the Child Support Order IEPD describes the court’s findings and judgment concerning the financial responsibilities of a child’s non-custodial parent.

The Court/Child Welfare National Exchange Template (NET) Project developed several national reference models to describe the exchange of information between a state or county child welfare agency and a court with jurisdiction over child abuse, neglect, and dependency cases.  The NET team included representatives from HHS ACF Children’s Bureau’s Division of State Systems, two of the Children’s Bureau’s National Resource Centers (Child Welfare Data & Technology, and Legal & Judicial Issues), representatives from state and local child welfare agencies and courts, and NCSC.

OJJDP’s National Juvenile Information Sharing Initiative (NJIS) worked with one of its JIS pilot sites to identify and develop several high-priority data exchange specifications, including education messages between juvenile probation, law enforcement, and a public school district.  In a collaborative effort, OJJDP’s NJIS worked with the University of Massachusetts Medical School to develop the data exchange for  the Massachusetts Youth Screening Instrument (MAYSI-2).  This data exchange has been successfully implemented at one of the NJIS’s pilot sites.  Additional data exchanges developed include information regarding a serious, habitual offender direct intervention (SHODI), record of law enforcement’s Field Contact with a juvenile, and Human Service placement and services exchanges.

Notes on Court Document Redaction

Our friends at Princeton University's Center for Information Technology Policy (CITP) have posted a very interesting article "Studying the Frequency of Redaction Failures in PACER".  As most of you know, PACER is the US Federal Courts program for access to court case management and case documents that have been either E-filed or scanned.  CITP author Timothy B. Lee explains the differences in PDF and other formats that are used in electronic document systems and the software they developed to study the problem (which they make available).  The article ends with a discussion on technical approaches that could be used to address the redaction issue.

In addition, there are other technical resources available.  For example, if you use Adobe Acrobat Pro one might want to check out a couple of web pages and videos on subject here and here.

Today courts are often placing the burden of redaction upon the litigants.  The Wyoming courts have earlier this year released new rules on document redaction that can be viewed here.

And other redaction rules have been posted by the following courts:

• USA Federal Courts
• Nevada State Courts
• Washington State Courts

Note - the accompanying graphic was adapted from the publically available picture of a redacted page from the ACLU vs. Ashcroft lawsuit.