US Federal Courts Update Public Access Policies

The March, 2010 edition of The Third Branch Federal Court newsletter contains an interesting article: Judicial Conference Approves Steps to Improve Public Access.  The article describes several actions to decrease the cost of using their PACER public access system and to make digital audio recordings available. The article also noted that in 2009:

"PACER received more than 360 million requests for electronic access to information from the over 33 million federal cases that have documents online."

More PDF Security Problems

On top of previous warnings, Adobe and FoxIt have announced actions that users should implement to prevent malicious programs from being automatically launched when opening an infected PDF file.  An excellent article on the subject was posted on the ZDNet blog Zero Day by Ryan Naraine and Dancho Danchev at:

http://blogs.zdnet.com/security/?p=6028&tag=nl.e550



Program security updates are expected to be released during the week of April 12, 2010.

e-Courts Conference Agendas Posted

Earlier this week the conference agendas for both the e-Courts East Tampa, Florida - Sept 13-15 and e-Courts West Las Vegas, Nevada - December 13-15 were posted on the conference website.  And additional information regarding the vendor exposition has also been listed.  The conferences are really coming together with many new ideas being shared for the first time.

This and that on April Fools Day

We've been collecting a few items of interest over the past few weeks.  The first is the BlackBox Wireless Video Presentation System.  This small box connects to a prjector or flat panel via their VGA interface and allows one to connect your laptop via Wi-Fi to display your presentations and video.  Further, it lets up to 254 users share and swap the connection and allows for a 4-to-1 screen-split projection.

Second, we participated in one of the series of Law.gov project seminars at Cornell University.  The first of many project goals are to develop "detailed technical specifications for markup, authentication, bulk access, and other aspects of a distributed registry" for legal materials.  The project's website is: http://resource.org/law.gov/  A list of upcoming events can be viewed at:
http://legalinformatics.wordpress.com/2010/03/10/law-gov-upcoming-events-updated/


Third, we had the honor to visit to the Fayette County, Pennsylvania courthouse.  Courtroom Number 1 literally brings the phrase "Temple of Justice" to mind.  Interestingly in the courthouse law library was a display for local crafts-people who had made book bags from... recycled law books.  To see what we mean visit their website at: http://www.bookbags.us.com/

Some Courts Are Using E-Mail for E-Filing

During some recent research we ran across several courts that are allowing E-mail as a method for electronic filing of court documents.  The North Dakota Supreme Court order providing guidance for e-filing using e-mail can be viewed at:

http://www.ndcourts.com/court/rules/Administrative/AO14.htm

Similarly the UK Courts Service guidance for using e-mail to submit documents can be seen at:
http://www.hmcourts-service.gov.uk/infoabout/email_guidance/email_guidance_general.htm

And last, in an earlier CTB article we discovered that Israel is also using e-mail as part of their system.