This is the United States Administrative Office of the Courts' Case Management/Electronic Case Files software used by the federal courts. The Mississippi Supreme Court and its Administrative Office of the Courts have been implementing this system in some of their state courts, and Texas just sent a team from our Judicial Committee on Information Technology to see how that is going. In a nutshell, their pilot is going well, we were quite impressed; check it out at http://www.mssc.state.ms.us/mec/mec.html. They imposed a new $10 filing fee on all civil filings to fund the effort and have a contractual arrangement with their state IT office (like our Department of Information Resources) to assist in the effort.
Coincidentally, we were there on the day when the Mississippi Supreme Court issued an administrative order ruling that the most recent budget cutting order by the executive branch cannot be applied, under separation of powers, to the judiciary.
It does not give me confidence that the system requirements top out with discontinued products that are even nearing the end of their official support -- Windows XP, Internet Explorer 7, Firefox 2.0.
ReplyDeleteCM/ECF always struck me as a clunky system right out of the late 1990s that no one had an incentive to modernize. It would be a shame if that was "the future," especially if Texas became dependent for technical updates on an organization that has already demonstrated its lack of interest in making things easier for users.
What does CM/ECF provide that makes it so attractive, from an administrative perspective? Does Texas OCA plan to lock down the documents behind a paywall, like the federal government does with PACER, to generate further revenue from users?