Request from the Electronic Court Filing Technical Committee

["Winters, Roger" <Roger.Winters@METROKC.GOV>]

Dear Steering Committee:

 

As you know, I am the elected representative from the Electronic Court Filing Technical Committee (ECFTC) to the Legal XML Member Section Steering Committee. In that capacity, I bring you a request from ECFTC for support. Since the Steering Committee has not been successful in meeting recently by conference call, I am making this request through e-mail.

 

ECFTC requests funds necessary to obtain professional services to analyze the results of the "E-Filing Process Models" survey we are conducting. The survey was prepared by one of two subcommittees whose work is prerequisite to ECFTC's developing the "Electronic Court Filing -- Blue" specification. Schema-based "Blue" is the focus of ECFTC's work: We already produced several DTD-based specifications (Court Filing 1.0 and 1.1; Court Document 1.1; Query and Response 1.1). As you know, those specifications have been approved by the Conference of State Court Administrators (COSCA) and National Association for Court Management (NACM) as Proposed Standards for electronic filing and documents in the courts.

 

ECFTC's Process Models Subcommittee prepared a detailed survey that is now being sent to every court with electronic filing and every electronic filing provider known to us. The survey is to help ECFTC lay a strong foundation for true interoperability under "Blue" by obtaining detailed information about the business and technical models in actual use in courts with some form of electronic filing.

 

ECFTC seeks funds we believe necessary to properly collect and analyze the survey results. We believe it is appropriate to fund this effort using resources accrued by the Member Section, since ECFTC is the largest and most productive of the Section's technical committees. We have estimated that at least $10,000 will be needed to ensure a quality product.

 

Our target is for this work to begin in mid-September when survey results will have been collected, with a report to be presented to the ECFTC at its face-to-face meeting in late October in Kansas City (in conjunction with the Court Technology Conference there). We seek this funding as soon as possible, so we can identify and contract with a consultant or firm capable of doing the work.

 

I look forward to joining a meeting in the near future where I might hear any questions you have about this request for support of the Member Section's largest TC. I hope we will be able to meet and act on this request soon.

 

Regards,

 

Roger

 

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