ECF 5 Feedback (WD30)

Greeting TC members,

We at Tyler Technologies have encountered several challenges when attempting to model our needs with ECF 5. Specifically:

Problem 1: CaseParticipantRoleCode

Page 48 of WD30 says:

Parties not represented by an attorney should be represented with ecf:CaseParty and the ecf:CaseParticipantRoleCode value “SelfRepresentedLitigant”.

We believe this is a poor practice – mixing two legal concepts: 1) A person’s role within the case and 2) whether the person is self-represented or represented by counsel. For this reason, we recommend:

the addition of a separate Boolean valued element to indicate self-represented
removing the SelfRepresentedLitigant value from CaseParticipantRoleCode.gc

Problem 2: ReserveCourtDate

We have added this operation (and it’s cousins AllocateCourtDate and NotifyCourtDate) to our implementation recently to accommodate requirements in Cook County, IL. However, we found that we needed ReserveCourtDate to provide calendar availability information via the synchronous response. We use this in two models:

The filer requests the next available hearing dates, as follows:
1. Request with no date specified
2. Response with N number of next available dates
The filer requests a specific hearing date
1. Request with a specific date specified
2. Response with either that date (requested date was available) or no date (requested date was not available)

Problem 3: Hearing Dates

We believe the schema should allow UTC for hearings dates, since statewide systems can have courts in multiple timezones. This would eliminate the ambiguity. Specifically the Case/CaseAugmentation/CaseCourtEvent/CourtEventSchedule structure’s ScheduledDate element for the following messages:

ReserveCourtDate Response Message
AllocateCourtDate Request Message
NotifyCourtDate Request Message

Thanks for your consideration.

Philip Baughman
Senior Software Engineering Manager, eSolutions
Tyler Technologies, Inc.

P: 972.713.3770 ext: 113406

www.tylertech.com

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