Highlights of Washington face-to-face

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Subject: Highlights of Washington face-to-face




From: "John Greacen" <>
To: "Electronic Court Filing Technical Committeee" <>
Date: Fri, 1 Aug 2003 01:21:05 -0600














For those of you who were not able to participate in the
meeting, or the conference calls, here are some brief highlights, to be
amplified by Dr. Leff’s minutes.

 

We resolved to request funds from the Legal XML Member
Section to provide support for the work of the Efiling Process
 Models Subcommittee.

 

Mary McQueen reported that the Implementation Policy
Statement we approved several months ago will be presented to the COSCA/NACM
Joint Tech Committee for formal review and approval.

 

Mary also reported that the Department of Justice will be
awarding the National Center for State
Courts a grant of $800,000 to refine and complete a Courts XML data dictionary
component to reside within the JXDD 3.0 and to implement the JXDD 3.0 within
the judicial branch.  Mary was part of discussions concerning the project
the weekend following the TC meeting.

 

Diane Lewis made a presentation to the membership describing
the standards and electronic filing environment within which she is working in
the Executive Office of US Attorneys.  The presentation included an
extended description of the CM/ECF electronic filing application now in place
in 76 of the 200 federal courts.  Mike Greenwood from the Administrative
Office of United States Courts contributed to the discussion, described the XML
supporting features of the 6.0 version of Adobe Acrobat, and surmised that the federal
courts’ most likely first application of XML will be the bankruptcy
petition and schedules.

 

The members present developed a proposal for use of the
OASIS polling mechanism for our decision-making – to make sure that our
decisions truly represent the affirmative will of the TC membership rather than
a lack of interest or attention to an issue presented.  Our current
process of putting a policy into place unless members object does not ensure
that members affirmatively endorse our policies, directions, and, ultimately,
our specifications.  Roger Winters is preparing a formal statement of the
proposed process for consideration by the TC.

 

The TC approved a final version of the Efiling Process
Models survey and cover letter for dissemination by Dwight Daniels.  We
developed a preliminary list of persons, organizations, and entities to whom
Dwight should send the survey.  We also suggested that he contact Susan
Larson of Efiling Report to supplement the list we developed.

 

We heard a report from Dr. Leff on a project conducted by a
group of his students to use the Court Document 1.1 DTD and the JXDD 3.0 to
construct a schema for court Orders of Protection in domestic violence cases. 
The members present asked that the students test two additional
approaches.  The first would focus on tagging the variable data within the
Order of Protection form for use with a stylesheet in which the standard
wording would reside.  The second would use Adobe Acrobat 6.0 to imbed XML
tags within an Order of Protection.  During our conference call at which
this direction was reported, Rolly Chambers expressed
very strong misgivings about the first alternative.  He reported extensive
discussions within the eContracts TC concluding that all language in a legal
document is essential to an understanding of any words included within
it.  Extracting a few words as data and relegating the rest to
“boilerplate” in a stylesheet threatens the integrity and meaning
of the document.  Robin Gibson also expressed concerns about the integrity
of transient compound documents whose meaning is altered whenever the stylesheet
is modified.  Members noted the importance of version control in dealing
with this issue.  The members present persisted in their request to Dr.
Leff and his students that they test these other two approaches –
understanding that we are treating this effort as a research project rather
than a standards setting effort at this point.

 

Robin Gibson provided a status report on current plans for
vetting, augmenting and implementing the JXDD 3.0.  GTRI has proposed a
list of about 100 reference schemas that would be developed using the JXDD 3.0
for specific justice system needs.  Twelve of those reference schemas are
court applications.  The TC resolved to disseminate the list of proposed
reference schemas to the TC membership for their comments and input. Are there
any major areas of court operations not covered by the contemplated reference
schemas?  We will also encourage our members to write one of the listed
schemas.  One of the implementation sites for JXDD 3.0 is the Colorado
judicial branch integrated justice effort. 

 

There is considerable interest in mapping the Court Filing
1.1 DTD to the JXDD 3.0 elements.  The OXCI project is planning to develop
a schema based on Court Filing 1.1 and JXDD 3.0.  Dr. Leff’s work
maps the Court Document 1.1 DTD elements to the JXDD 3.0.  These efforts
should provide strawman mappings for review by the TC.

 

Dallas Powell shared some more of his experiences with the
Electronic Court Filing 1.1 specification, expressing his view that we still do
not have sufficient experience on which to base a Court Filing Blue
specification that would be demonstrably better than the current standard. 
He has found that the requirements for an agency to interact successfully with
a court differ from those of a lawyer or law firm.  He also suggests that
the 1.0 and 1.1 specifications were designed primarily for one way
communication – from the lawyer to the court.  He proposed a basic
conceptual structure for a Court Filing Blue, which includes the principle that
the messaging and envelope components would not be JXDD 3.0 compliant, but
would be compliant with a standard justice level messaging protocol.  A
new “automation data” layer within the schema would be JXDD 3.0 compliant. 
The schema would be developed to support full two way communications between courts
and their users.

 

Don Bergeron provided an analysis of the draft Court Policy
DTD contributed by Nebraska.  He believes that it should serve well as a strawman
starting point for the Court Policy component of Court Filing Blue.

 

Roger Winters suggested that a Blue Book group be formed to
begin developing the format and structure for the Court Filing Blue
specification.  

 

 

John M. Greacen

Greacen Associates, LLC

HCR 78, Box 23

Regina, New Mexico 87046

505-289-2164

505-780-1450 (cell)

 


















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