[legalxml-courtfiling] [Fwd: ECF 1.1 spec testing status report fromKing County, Washington]

["John M. Greacen" <john@greacen.net>]

Here is a short but very helpful status report on the use of the 1.1
specification in King County.  Catherine and Roger have asked for
comments and suggestions on one issue they have encountered.  Does
anyone have any ideas for them?

--
John M. Greacen
Greacen Associates, LLC.
18 Fairly Road
Santa Fe, NM  87507
505-471-0203

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• From: "Krause, Catherine" <Catherine.Krause@METROKC.GOV>
• To: "John Greacen (john@greacen.net)" <john@greacen.net>
• Date: Fri, 27 Sep 2002 13:06:10 -0700

Title: ECF 1.1 spec testing status report from King County, Washington

John:

Per my prior message, King County's electronic filing pilot project has had some significant delays due to issues unrelated to Court Filing 1.1.  We are currently working with our vendor to ensure that our business requirements will be met, and are working on a detailed schedule of remaining tasks.  We do know that our pilot will be delayed until 2003.

We had started our acceptance testing for the e-filing pilot system when significant issues were found that resulted in the delays I mentioned.  This is what we have found to this point in the project regarding Court Filing 1.1:

- Our pilot project is intentionally limited in scope:

• It primarily includes filings where a King County web site is acting as the EFP (a.k.a. EFSP), creating a Court Filing 1.1 filing envelope that is transmitted to our King County EFM, which returns a Court Filing 1.1 confirmation envelope with the results of the filing.  The results of the filing are displayed to the user via the web site as either error messages for "rejected" filings or a filing receipt for "received" filings.  These are the only two dispositions that we are using.
• Even though the EFP and EFM are both King County entities, we have architected our system so that these are separated. The King County EFM can also receive Court Filing 1.1 filing envelopes created by other EFPs, such as commercial EFPs, law firms, etc., and return the appropriate response via a Court Filing 1.1 confirmation envelope to those EFPs.  During our acceptance testing, the intent is to verify that the system will accept filings transmitted directly and not created by our web site.  But, no actual outside EFPs are participating in our pilot.
• We are not including an e-commerce component in our pilot.  Accordingly, we could not allow filings in a case that would require fee payments, even though we could accept other filings that would not.
• We are not including case initiation in our pilot because they often require a fee, provision of a case schedule, and other complexities that we wanted to implement separately after we had evaluated the technology and business processes utilized during the pilot.
• We are using user IDs and passwords for filer authentication by our EFP.  We are not requiring digital signatures for filings originating outside the court.  Filings originated by the court are not included in our pilot.
• Our clerk's office does not process attachments separately from the lead document.  Thus, we are including all of the document content in the lead document and are not testing any of the attachment data elements.



- Lessons learned thus far during the project:

• We included the need to use Legal XML Court Filing standards in our RFP, and also in the Requirements for our pilot system developed by our vendor.  We also included information regarding the system architecture, and the need to separate the EFP and EFM functions per our draft state technical standards for E-Filing.  Despite this, our vendor did not follow these guidelines in the initial versions of the pilot system Design; they had responded to that direction by trying instead to give us something they thought was equivalent or better than the "limited" DTD approach of 1.1. The lesson for others would be that vendors may tend to look for updates, substitutions, and shortcuts that would in effect lead a system to abandon its direct tie to the standards. It should be noted that our vendor has not been a participant in Legal XML up to this point.
• When we did successfully start working with the vendor on the details of Design for the system to include the Court Filing 1.1 envelope, we found that some aspects of 1.1 are not clear enough to show us unambiguously which elements relate to our data items.  After several meetings, we did come to what at the time seemed to be a Design that incorporated all of the data elements needed for our pilot, based on our interpretation of the Court Filing 1.1 DTD.
• During acceptance testing, we were able to successfully transmit documents from our EFP (filing web site) to our EFM via a Court Filing 1.1 filing envelope.
• During acceptance testing, we were able to successfully transmit confirmation of a filing from our EFM to our EFP via a Court Filing 1.1 confirmation envelope; we used the memo field to transmit error messages for "rejected" filings and displayed a filing receipt for "received" filings.
• We had an issue with the filing receipt that is a discussion item for resolution by our vendor.  We had wanted to include the documentTitle in the filing receipt because the received message would be less than helpful when it references a Filename or Path name only. If the receipt might be brought to the Court in the case of a question about the filing, the Court would want to see the Title, not some reference number or path name. Note that documentTitle is not included in the Court Filing 1.1 confirmation envelope.  Per our vendor, that was why they didn't include it.  I believe it could be included, either in the courtDocumentReference data element (since that is court defined) or by our EFP (web site) based on the leadDocument id referenced in the confirmation.  But, this issue hasn't been resolved, and input from the committee on how this could or should have been handled would be welcome.  This issue has led me to review other data elements utilized by the vendor for transmission, and I feel some others have been misinterpreted.  In particular, some data extensions were included for internal purposes, and I am not yet convinced they are necessary.  If we determine that we did need to utilize data extensions, we will provide that information to the TC for consideration for additions to Court Filing 2.0.
• We will develop a list of the data elements we have used, indicating the interpretations we made regarding how Court Filing 1.1 would be used. We will not publish such a list until after we have gone through our requirements review and redesign processes.
• We did not have an opportunity to test the outside EFP to King County EFM functionality before our project was put on hold.  This test will occur when our acceptance testing resumes.

We hope that our report can provide two things for the TC:  1) Clarifying how to use 1.1 (to show, for example, how to treat a document title) and 2) Providing experience from which some of the requirements for 2.0 can be drawn.

As I mentioned, I am unable to attend the Boston face-to-face meeting.  Roger Winters will be attending the phone portion of the meeting.  If you would like to share this brief report with the TC in Boston as part of proposed agenda item 8, you are welcome to do so.  We still are likely to make some changes in the specific data elements in the envelope that we use, and our tests thus far have been generally successful but it would be premature to state that we have yet drawn any final conclusions.  We had hoped to have more detailed results for the TC, but unfortunately a formal result of our experience implementing Court Filing 1.1 won't be available until some time in 2003.

I would be happy to respond to any questions from TC members as a result of the discussion in Boston via the list after I return from vacation.

Sincerely,

Catherine Krause
E-Filing Project Manager
King County Department of Judicial Administration
(206)296-7860
catherine.krause@metrokc.gov
 
And

Roger Winters
Electronic Court Records Manager
King County
Department of Judicial Administration
516 Third Avenue, E-609 MS: KCC-JA-0609
Seattle, Washington 98104
V: (206) 296-7838 F: (206) 296-0906
roger.winters@metrokc.gov

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