RE: ECF 5 Feedback (WD30)

TC members,

We held a sidebar call today (7/9/18) to discuss a topic from Tyler originally posed for (and very briefly discussed) the May TC, highlighted yellow below. Today’s participants were: Jim Price, Gary Graham, Jim Cabral, Todd Vincent, Enrique Othon, Philip Baughman. We have boiled it down to three topics which we would like your input on during Tuesday’s ECF TC call:

Topic 1. Synchronous and/or Asynchronous

ECF defines an asynchronous model for ReserveCourtDate/NotifyCourtDate. Of course, this model is necessary to accommodate any business operation that may involve tasks for which the initiating call (ReserveCourtDate) cannot wait. However, if no such tasks exists and the business requirements call for a “(near) real time” response (which normally translates to a synchronous model), there are two possible options:

Option1: Simulate Synchronous

Use the ECF asynchronous model to “simulate” a synchronous scenario in order to provide the near real-time experience. Problem: Increased complexity for vendors/courts for requirements that do not exist for them

Option 2: Use Synchronous

Truly use a synchronous response, and forego the use of the asynchronous callback. Problem: the ECF standard does not allow for this

Topic 2: Representing “no results”

For an operation which provides synchronous results (e.g. GetCaseList), when there are no results (no cases found) there are two possible options:

Option 1: Return an error/status code of 0 and simply return no cases.

Option 2: Return a non-zero error/status code that explicitly represents “no results found”

The ECF standards support either of these models so we are interested in discussing preferences, and whether the standard should endorse one method or the other.

Topic 3: Timing of Scheduling

When should scheduling of hearings take place? During the filing process? Before? After? Any of the above? What, if anything, should the ECF standard say on this matter?

Philip Baughman
Senior Software Engineering Manager, eSolutions
P: 972.713.3770 ext: 113406

From: Baughman, Philip
Sent: Friday, May 04, 2018 6:55 PM
To: 'legalxml-courtfiling@lists.oasis-open.org' <legalxml-courtfiling@lists.oasis-open.org>
Subject: 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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