Highlights of Washington face-to-face

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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