Oct 3, 2001
counterclaim Success in Georgia Pilot Project
From the Georgia Courts Automation Commission http://www.gcasite.com/whatsnew.html
Electronic Court Filing Interoperability Pilot Project
The mission of the Georgia Courts Automation Commission (GCAC) is to encourage and facilitate automation in all courts in the State of Georgia. In furtherance of this mission, GCAC sponsored a Court Filing Interoperability Pilot Project whose purpose was to provide Georgia courts and attorneys with proof-of-concept of electronic court filing and to better understand the need for, and barriers to, developing court filing systems and standards in Georgia.
The Pilot had two phases. Phase I completed in August of 2001 and Phase II November of 2001. The Interoperability Pilot closed in November 2001. The complete document and those associated with it can be found on the Georgia State University Electronic Court Filing web site at http://e-ct-file.gsu.edu/CourtFilings/Interoperability/.
The Georgia Pilot was completely successful in completing its Phase I objectives. That is, in each of the four participating courts, each respective vendor implemented an end-to-end court filing system and each of those courts did live filings in real cases.
The Pilot was partially successful in completing its Phase II objectives. On 3 October, Counterclaim.com passed an XML filing to @Court and received an XML confirmation in return. Both the XML filing and the XML confirmation validated against the DTD. Shortly thereafter, E-Filing.com received and XML filing from Verilaw and Verilaw received the corresponding XML confirmation. Again, both the XML filing and the XML confirmation validated against the DTD. Subsequently, several other test filings and confirmations were sent among vendors. This is the first time in Court Filing history that this has happened. In this respect, the pilot was successful.
However, interoperability testing did not incorporate a few important requirements. First, testing was not done using robust security. All of the test filings were done without authenticating the source filer (that is, anyone who knew the URLs of the test machines could have attempted to file). Further, while it was a requirement to use SSL, only one of the vendors had a server available with a server certificate. There were also budget issues and delays in acquiring a server certificate for one of the courts. Eventually, time ran out so testing never occurred over SSL.
Second, the vendors did not use live data. It was recognized at the outset of the pilot that the vendors could have valid business reasons for not wanting to create live, interoperable systems. As a result, agreements among GCAC, the courts, and the vendors embodied in the Technical Requirements Document made live testing an "optional requirement."
Related to passing live data, the participants never completely harmonized case category information. Without standard case categories, while courts and vendors can successfully send and receive information in XML, the case category is not useful.
Finally, payment systems were not tested for interoperability.
Partially because of the business models employed by the vendors and partially because of budget constraints, the pilot was conducted on a very low budget (under $50,000, not including staff and contractors already employed or under contract). Given this, Phase II of the pilot has shown proof-of-concept of electronic filing and that, given appropriate resources, interoperability is achievable.
GCAC remains committed to this technology and is prepared to share the experience gained from this pilot with any Georgia court wishing to implement an electronic filing system.
