Proposed Washington State E-filing Identification Process



Proposed Washington State E-filing Identification Process

Background

The Washington State Supreme Court recently adopted a new general rule (#30) on electronic filing. As originally drafted, the rule required Electronic Filing Service Providers (EFSP's) to establish their own identification and authentication rules for their customers. The EFSP's accepted by implication the potential liability for filers who misrepresent their identifies to a court Electronic Filing Manager (EFM) or the court itself. Filed documents from an EFSP would be deemed signed by the court. No traditional analog or new digital signatures would be required by the court.

This proposal in regard to signatures was not acceptable. As finally passed, the rule requires any author of a filed document to first request and receive a password and personal identification number (PIN) before e-filing (or having their lawyer e-file their authored document). This requirement also holds true for authors of third-party affidavits. The PIN requirement is functionally redundant to the password, but it was required by judicial officers and the state bar for political reasons.

The proposed identification business rules and business process laid out below have not yet been adopted and are controversial in several respects. For example, some court personnel do not believe the driver license check is necessary to comply with the requirements of General Rule 30. They view that step as an unnecessary complication and expense for the e-filing process. Some court personnel find the collection of gender as an identifier objectionable. Some lawyers and court personnel find the driver license check to be a problem because it currently excludes out-of-state filers, who may be a significant proportion of document filers for some case types and cause codes. [If the driver license check is retained, we anticipate the ability to check out-of-state driver licenses through the Washington State Department of Licensing (DOL) using mechanisms established by interstate compact and AMVAA standards sometime in the future.]

The DOL driver license check is an attempt to validate the authenticity of the identification information submitted. It serves the same business function that a real-time credit card check does for online users of PayPal.

The court rule requires either that the Washington State Administrative Office of the Courts (AOC) provide the identification service or local courts provide the same service after being certified by the AOC. The architectural strategy of the AOC is to provide the entire identification service and its several real-time transactions as a web service that courts and e-filing providers can build transparently into their e-filing applications. Some SOAP and WSDL code has been generated to give vendors and courts with e-filing pilots initial guidance on what the service might look like.

Identifier Business Rules

1. Filers requesting a logon ID, password and PIN must submit the following identifiers:

- Name

- Date of Birth

- Gender

- Driver's License Number [Filers who do not possess a driver's license must submit a Washington Identification Card Number, which DOL also issues.]

2. The match between driver's license number or identification card number with the submitted name, gender and date of birth will be checked in real-time at DOL before issuing a logon ID, password and PIN.

3. Members of the Washington State Bar must submit the following additional identifier, which will be used to collect or verify the other identifiers:

- Bar Number

Identifier Business Process

1. First time filers must request a logon ID, password and PIN from the EFSP or directly from the AOC. Note that the EFSP may be a commercial vendor or may be the court itself.

2. The EFSP requests the appropriate identifiers.

3. The filer submits the identifiers.

4. The EFSP passes the identifiers to the AOC (or the equivalent court service), which checks them against the DOL database.

5. If the identifiers match, the AOC (or the equivalent court service) provides a logon ID and prompts the filer to submit a password and PIN that complies with business rules for secure identifiers.

6. The filer selects a password and PIN.

7. Filers with Logon ID's, passwords and PIN's must submit them to the EFSP in order to e-file case documents.

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