Tag: technology

Indiana courts find interesting new applications for technology

The beginning of each calendar year is the prime time for State of the Judiciary addresses, an opportunity for each state’s Chief Justice to personally address legislators, request needed resources, and champion the court system’s accomplishments.

This year, Indiana Chief Justice Loretta Rush highlighted some fascinating technological developments in her court system. One involved a pilot project that uses AI to generate transcripts in mental health commitment cases. Transcripts are now available in minutes rather than months. This is critical because many commitment decisions are appealed, and in the ordinary case transcripts take so long to generate that the appeal cannot be heard until the period of commitment has passed, effectively denying a party the right of appeal. The new technology expedites the entire process and adds a meaningful appeal option in these difficult cases.

The second development is the creation of an integrated system for sharing data on the statewide jail population. Indiana currently has 20 different jail management software systems, which were not necessarily able to talk to each other. (This sounds incredible, but given the long history of local courts being tied to their county systems rather a statewide court management system, it’s still not all that surprising.) The new system will allow the sharing of critical information, including fingerprint data.

The Indiana legislature will have to fully fund the jail software to the tune of $3 million, and has not committed to it yet. But the developments are interesting and noteworthy, and seemingly highly beneficial for both court administration and public safety.

NCSC creates innovation lab to introduce new technology to courts

This is a very cool development. The National Center for State Courts (NCSC) has created an innovation lab that allows court leaders to observe and test the latest court technology. The lab grew of a recognition that courthouse space needs to be used more creatively in order to provide meaningful access to users.

The lab’s focus extends beyond the courtroom, with prototype “community access points” for public users who will be accessing court services from another location, as well as advanced conference rooms and huddle spaces.

Kudos to the NCSC for embracing the challenges of innovation. I’ll look forward to seeing how these technologies are incorporated by the courts in the coming years.

The courts are still in Phase I of their relationship with AI — but change is coming

This week, the Colorado Court of Appeals issued its first opinion cautioning litigants about relying on generative AI to draft legal briefs, joining a number of other courts that have similarly warned (and sometimes sanctioned) parties and lawyers for including “bogus” AI-generated case citations. 

Judicial pushback against the errors caused by ChatGPT and other early publicly available AI models is sound policy, no different than teachers balking at AI-generated student essays. The AI programs currently available to the public can be astonishing in their creativity, but are also prone to hallucination and more often than not produce a mediocre result. Professor Ethan Mollick has compared such programs to a tireless but clumsy intern — eager to please and lightning fast, but lacking polish, sophistication, or accountability to reality. So it is natural that the courts’ first priority is to put out the fire of fake case citations.

But one should not confuse legitimate concerns about flawed AI today with pessimism about the transformative power of AI going forward. AI’s large language models are learning very quickly, and a rapid influx of users will spur even more rapid development. Legal research services like Lexis/Nexis and Westlaw have introduced their own first-generation AI services, which aim to connect more rigorously to actual legal precedent. It will not be long before legal research is indeed faster, better, and more thorough than ever before — a change akin to the introduction of electronic legal databases in the 1980s.

The courts, too, are not too far off from embracing AI for their own purposes. In Phase II, judges and court staff will rely on AI to read briefs and transcripts, summarize arguments, check citations, and even produce questions for oral argument. In Phase III, they will use AI to draft opinions and orders, initially in low-stakes cases (to help with the workload) but eventually in high-stakes, complex litigation. In Phase IV, AI itself will hear the case, render the decision, and draft an order or opinion.

Phase IV may feel futuristic, but it is coming, and sooner than we think. State courts in particular are contending with a massive increase in self-represented litigants — individuals who have real legal problems but who cannot (or choose not to) pay a lawyer to help guide them through the system. Many have cases that are legally straightforward (such as a basic contract dispute) and may be willing to submit those cases to an AI “judge” with the promise of a quicker and less expensive resolution. As AI improves, such judging programs eventually will be available on demand and from the comfort of one’s own home, no different that the modern telehealth industry. They may start as private, ADR-style offerings that compete with courts for customers, but eventually court systems themselves will feel pressure to embrace the same technology.

Of course, courts will not move into AI judging lightly, and nothing will happen until the courts are convinced that whatever system they employ can guarantee an accurate application of existing law, preserve the guarantees of due process, and protect confidentiality as needed. But we are on cusp of a major technological transformation that could benefit resource-starved courts and decision-starved parties in equal measure.

Today’s COVID responses can improve tomorrow’s judicial performance evaluations

That’s the main thrust of my latest guest post at the IAALS blog. Forced to adopt a wide range of technological resources during the pandemic, courts systems are now better situated to use that technology to improve surveys, observe judicial behavior, and communicate wih the public.

Tillman on transparency of court records in Ireland

My law school classmate Seth Barrett Tillman, who has become a prominent voice in the legal academy on both sides of the Atlantic, has proposed a series of transparency reforms for the Irish courts.

The proposal includes open access to the parties’ briefs and filings, and a searchable database of notices of appeal.

These are worthwhile ideas, and demonstrate how a relatively modest investment in technology can pay significant dividends for access to justice and public confidence in the courts.

Colorado’s Chief Justice on court operations, judicial selection, and experiential diversity

The Colorado Springs Gazette has a terrific short interview with the state’s Chief Justice, Brian Boatright, on a wide variety of issues related to court operations and interdependence. Here is a taste:

[Q]: Is there any change during the COVID-19 era that you believe the Supreme Court couls permanently incorporate into its work post-pandemic?

Boatright: I believe that we will incorporate the practice of allowing attorneys to make oral argument remotely in certain circumstances. The pandemic has taught us that oral arguments can be efficient and effective wheh done virtually. I expect that attorneys who previously has to travel significant distances to present their arguments will want to take advantage of that option. Hopefully, that flexibility will reduce costs for their clients.

Chief Justice Boatright also discusses experiential diversity on the court, the role of collegiality, and the benefits of Colorado’s judicial selection system. It’s well worth a full read.

 

Arizona courts adopt new platform for handling digital evidence

The Arizona court system is adopting a modern digital platform to help streamline virtual hearings, according to this story in Government Technology. The platform will include a digital evidence center capable of holding all relevant digital evidence — from police body cam footage to data collected from smartphones — in a single place. The platform will also allow digital evidence to be collected, digitized, and shared remotely.

Chief Justice issues 2020 Year End Report

Per longstanding tradition, while you were anxiously coaxing 2020 into oblivion last night, the Chief Justice quietly issued his Year-End Report on the Federal Judiciary. Also per tradition, this year’s report features more musty anecdotes about the courts, this time focused (predictably) on pandemics. The Chief Justice congratulates the entire court system on its turn to video hearings and trials in the wake of the COVID-19 spread.

Kudos are indeed in order for reacting relatively swiftly, but I will save my formal congratulations for when the federal courts embrace technology with foresight and a commitment to transparency. Here’s an area where the federal courts could learn much from their state counterparts, if they are willing.

Making sense of the new PACER bill

There is plenty of room for constructive compromise, but it requires everyone to acknowledge that “free” PACER is not actually free.

Last week, the House of Representatives passed the Open Courts Act of 2020, H.R. 8235, by a voice vote. The bill would radically reform access to federal court records by requiring (among other things) that the courts’ PACER system be modernized and its contents made free to the public. The bill drew praise from open courts advocates, and furious pushback from the Judicial Conference and the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts (AO). Indeed, the Judicial Conference’s reaction was probably the most vigorous response I have seen from the courts in many years.

It is a rare piece of legislation these days that can simultaneously garner bipartisan support and solicit institutional panic from the judicial branch. So it’s worth examining closely. What we find is an opportunity for the court system to improve its transparency and its own performance, albeit not on the schedule or in the manner it would prefer. Continue reading “Making sense of the new PACER bill”