Roberts issues 10th annual year-end report on federal judiciary
By Denise M. Champagne
The Daily Record Newswire
ROCHESTER, NY — The next generation of case management and electronic case filing is being developed by the Administrative Office of the United States Courts.
In his 10th annual year-end report on the federal judiciary, Supreme Court Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. reveals the enhanced system will include a central sign-on feature that will allow court users and attorneys to file and retrieve information in any federal court using the same login and password, greatly simplifying access to the system.
He says future development efforts will provide automatic calendaring notices to interested parties that will improve access to court proceedings while minimizing scheduling conflicts.
He gives no timeframe for when the changes will be implemented, but notes the Supreme Court is developing its own electronic filing system which could be operational as soon as 2016. More information on that system, including the process for attorneys to register as authorized filers, will be released in the coming months.
The federal court system began implementing the case management and electronic case filing system, more commonly known as CM/ECF, in 2001, according to the report. The system contains more than one billion retrievable documents spread among the 13 courts of appeals, 94 district courts, 90 bankruptcy courts and other specialized tribunals.
More than 600,000 attorneys have used it to file case documents, which are up to 2.5 million documents electronically filed each month.
The Public Access to Court Electronic Records, known as PACER, allows the public to view federal court documents in courthouses nationwide, something not possible before the advent of CM/ECF.
Justice Roberts opens his report talking about The Washington Post hailing pneumatics as an emerging technology reshaping American society in 1893. It too reshaped the court system, although it took almost 40 years for “news of this dawning era” to reach the Supreme Court, which incorporated a pneumatic tube system into the design of its new courthouse, opened in 1935.
Decisions were then issued from the bench to a small group of journalists, which sent copies through pneumatic tubes to colleagues in press booths one floor below.
“For 36 years, virtually all of the court’s decisions reached the press through those portals,” Justice Roberts wrote, noting another Washington Post reporter, in 1963, described the pneumatic tube system as “perhaps the most primitive … in the entire communications industry.”
Former Chief Justice Warren Burger authorized the removal of the system in 1971, the same time he introduced the court’s familiar curved bench.
“The Washington Post’s celebration of the marvels of pneumatics, followed by the Supreme Court’s belated embrace and overdue abandonment of a pneumatic conveyance system, illustrates two tenets about technology and the courts; one obvious and the other less so,” Justice Roberts wrote. “First, the ceaseless growth of knowledge in a free society produces novel and beneficial innovations that are nonetheless bound for obsolescence from the moment they launch.”
Second, he notes, the courts proceed cautiously because they have to be prudent as neutral arbiters of disputes.
“For instance, the federal courts, like other government institutions, are subject to the federal procurement process, which understandably sacrifices speed in favor of fair procedures for commercial hardware and software vendors to compete for the government’s business,” Justice Roberts wrote.
He further notes the judiciary has a special duty to ensure equal access to justice, not just for tech-savvy people, but those intimidated by technology as well. There are also security concerns and protecting confidential information.
“Courts understandably proceed cautiously in introducing new information technology systems until they have fairly considered how to keep the information contained therein secure from foreign and domestic hackers, whose motives may range from fishing for secrets to discrediting the government or impairing court operations,” he says. “As technology proceeds apace, we cannot be sure what changes are in store, for the courts or society generally. Innovations will come and go, but the judiciary will continue to make steady progress in employing new technology to provide litigants with fair and efficient access to the courts.”
The report also includes a workload update, noting caseloads in 2014 were steady in the district courts and probation offices, but decreased in the appellate courts, bankruptcy
courts and pretrial services system.
Total filings for civil cases and criminal defendants in the district courts grew less than 1 percent to 376,536 with civil cases increasing 4 percent to 295,310, while filings from criminal defendants decreased 11 percent to 81,226. The number of people under post-conviction supervision rose nearly 1 percent to 132,858 and filings in the regional courts of appeals fell 3 percent to 54,988. Cases opened in the pretrial services system declined 8 percent to 100,068 and petitions filed in the bankruptcy courts dropped 13 percent to 963,739.
A copy of Justice Roberts’ report is available at www.uscourts.gov.
