OASIS Legal XML
OASIS Legal XML
Electronic Court Filing Technical Committee
Face to Face Meeting
December 13 and 14, 2006
United States District Court
333 Las Vegas Boulevard Sourth
Las Vegas, Nevada
Attendance Voting Member / Member / Observer X=Face-to-Face; T=Teleconference
|Name |Last Name |Present |
|John Aerts (LA County Information) |Aerts | |
|Alexandrou, Michael (Judicial Council of Georgia) |Alexandrou |X |
|Andrea Allione (Systeam US, Inc.) |Allione | |
|Adam Angione (Courthouse News Service, Inc.) |Angione |X |
|Donald Bergeron (Reed Elsevier) |Bergeron |T |
|Terry Bousquin (National Center for State Courts) |Bousquin |X |
|James Cabral (MTG Management Consultants) |Cabral |X |
|Scott Came (Individual) |Came | |
|Tom Carlson (National Center for State Courts) |Carlson |X |
|Rolly Chambers (American Bar Association) |Chambers | |
|Jamie Clark (OASIS Staff) |Clark | |
|Thomas Clarke, Co-Chair (National Center for State Courts) |Clarke |X |
|Robin Cover (OASIS) |Cover | |
|James Cusick (Wolters Kluwer) |Cusick |T |
|Robert DeFilippis (Individual- One Legal) |DeFilippis |X |
|Ann Dillon (Washington AOC) |Dillon | |
|Christopher (Shane) Durham (Reed Elsevier) |Durham |X |
|Scott Edson (LA County Information Systems Advisory Body) |Edson | |
|David Ewan (PRIA) |Ewan | |
|Robin Gibson, Secretary (Missouri AOC) |Gibson | |
|Charles Gilliam (ContentGuard) |Gilliam | |
|David Goodwin (Maricopa County) |Goodwin | |
|Gary Graham (Arizona Supreme Court) |Graham |X |
|John Greacen, Co-Chair (Individual) |Greacen |X |
|Jim Harris (National Center for State Courts) |Harris |X |
|Brian Hickman (Wolters Kluwer) |Hickman |X |
|Hui Ji (Judicial Council of Georgia) |Ji | |
|Aaron Jones (Maricopa County) |Jones | |
|John Jones (PRIA) |Jones | |
|Caitlin Kapsner (Oregon Judicial Department) |Kapsner | |
|Jeff Karotkin (Individual – Personal Attorney Service, Inc.) |Karotkin | |
|George Knecht |Knecht |X |
|Mark Ladd (Property Records ind.) |Ladd |T |
|Laurence Leff, Secretary (Individual) |Leff | |
|Rex McElrath (Judicial Council of Georgia) |McElrath |X |
|John Messing (Law-On-Line) |Messing |X |
|Robert O’Brien (Ottawa Courts Administration) |O’Brien |X |
|Dan O’Day (Thomson Corporation) |O’Day | |
|Catherine Plummer (SEARCH Group, Inc.) |Plummer | |
|Gary Poindexter (Individual) |Poindexter | |
|Nick Pope (Individual) |Pope | |
|Michael Robinson (Judicial Council of Georgia) |Robinson | |
| David Roth (Thomson Corporation) |Roth | |
|John Ruegg (LA County Information Systems Advisory Body) |Ruegg | |
|Tony Rutkowski (Verisign) |Rutkowski | |
|Nancy Rutter (Maricopa County) |Rutter | |
|Dan Sawka (Washington AOC) |Sawka | |
|Scott Schumacher (Thomson Corporation) |Schumacher | |
|Christopher Smith (California AOC) |Smith | |
|Ann Sweeney (Washington AOC) |Sweeney | |
|Mike Waite (US Department of Justice) |Waite | |
|D. Welsh (Microsoft Corporation) |Welsh | |
|Roger Winters, Editor, Representative to Member Section Steering Committee (Washington |Winters |X |
|AOC, King County) | | |
New Members Not Yet Reflected on OASIS Website
|Keith McMasters |McMasters |X |
|Yorek Stefanic (New York Unified Court System) |Stefanic |X |
Guests
|John Cook (Florida Office of State Courts Administrator) |Cook |X |
Agenda
Report on ECF 3.0 implementation assistance provided by MTG on behalf of the ECFTC
Review of all submissions for the January 2007 ECF release, including
Proposal from Rex McElrath and Dr. Laurence Leff for presenting free text and sequence indicators
Proposal from Rex McElrath for presenting alternative forms of the same document
Proposals from Jim Cabral regarding bar number, vendor client ID number, solving schema validation problems, and expanding the number and detail of schema instances included as part of the specification
Proposal from Shane Durham for an expanded code structure representation
Proposals from Shane Durham to deal with problems encountered during the Lexis Nexis bulk filing implementation
Proposal from Rex McElrath for additional elements needed for child support cases
Proposal from Scott Came for a means to identify a self-represented litigant
Any other proposals from TC members or others for changes to ECF 3.01 for inclusion in the January 2007 release.
Discussion of major expansions of the scope of ECF 3.0
- property records
- appellate cases
Discussion of Communications Plan prepared by Outreach Subcommittee
Discussion of proposed revised charter for the ECFTC
Selection of meeting dates and places for 2007 face to face meetings
Election of TC officers for 2007 calendar year
Decisions Made
The members elected the following officers for the 2007 calendar year
Public Sector Co-chair – Tom Clarke
Private Sector Co-chair – John Greacen
Representative to LegalXML Member Section Steering Committee – Roger Winters
Secretary – Robin Gibson
Webmaster – George Knecht
Editor – Roger Winters
Associate Editor – Adam Angione
The dates and places for 2007 face to face meetings will be:
April 18th (afternoon) and 19th – San Diego, California (in conjunction with the OASIS symposium)
July 12th and 13th – Chicago, Illinois (in conjunction with NACM annual meeting)
October 4th and 5th – Tampa, Florida (in conjunction with the NCSC Court Technology Conference)
December 5th and 6th – Las Vegas, Nevada (provisional, depending on the amount of work to be transacted)
The TC discussed each of the items on the agenda for inclusion in the 2007 and 2008 ECF releases. The 2007 release will be completed by the end of March 2007 and will be denominated ECF 3.1. Jim Cabral will serve as consultant for the drafting of this release.
The contents of the ECF 3.1 release will be:
Making changes to implement decisions on Tom Carlson-identified definitional/mapping issues resolved in New York and by conference telephone call
Including GJXDM bar number structure
Resolving the person identifier - ID/IDref issue
Including additional person-related transactional case identifiers
Resolving schema validation issues
Adding court filing policy enhancements to express hierarchies and context
Allowing multiple filing parties for a filing
Allowing for differentiated filing-related fees in the response to the getFee Query
Adding an additional timestamp(s) for filing processing events
Not requiring courtEvent in the document complete message
Possibly expanding courtEvent to include multiple documents
Possibly including demand and judgment amount metadata
Improving directions for the use of externally defined schemas – option of using schemaLocation attribute to refer to locally cached copy of external schema and explore distribution of the externally defined schemas
Modifying the Web Services Service Interaction Profile to specify MTOM for attachments
Adding a structure to support multiple versions of the same document
Adding child support elements
Including Shane Durham’s self represented litigant solution in the specification
Adding more sophisticated schema instances
The ECF 3.1 release will document all changes made to the specification
Jim Cabral and the co-chairs will establish a specific timetable for drafting, vetting, editing, and formal KAVI approval of the ECF 3.1 specification
Jim Cabral will serve as consultant for drafting the 2008 ECF release, which will be denominated ECF 4.0 and include the following contents:
Conformance to NIEM 2.0
Inclusion of additional elements for appellate efiling
Inclusion of additional elements needed for civil traffic, local ordinance, and parking cases
Modifications to the Web Services Service Interaction Profile to include multiple messages in the same transaction to accommodate bulk filing and a means of “chunking” documents too large to be transmitted in a single message
Re-examination of the model for service
The TC reviewed and further revised the proposed revised charter submitted by the co-chairs and approved its submission to Jamie Clark for approval by OASIS staff and formal adoption by the TC
The TC reviewed and approved the Communications Plan submitted by the Outreach Subcommittee, noting that the Member Section Steering Committee will not provide any funding for outreach efforts for 2007
The TC suggested that the subcommittee be more aggressive in its efforts to create an ECF user group which would meet in conjunction with other court events, that the subcommittee focus on marketing ECF to vendors, including case management information system vendors (including the use of the Forum for Advancement of Court Technology for this purpose), and the creation of an implementer exchange.
George Knecht agreed to create and monitor a discussion group for the exchange of information among ECF implementers
Roger Winters was named co-chair of the Electronic Filing Documents Subcommittee
The TC reviewed Mark Ladd’s analysis of property records specifications and approved his recommendation that the ECFTC and PRIA develop a mapping between their specifications rather than attempt to include property records within the ECF specification
The TC created the following small groups to resolve issues associated with ECF 3.1:
Small group to oversee the ECF drafting effort – Cabral, Came, Clarke, Durham and Harris (Tom Clarke will serve as chair)
Modifications to court policy – DeFillipis, Durham, Harris and O’Brien (Shane Durham will serve as chair)
New time stamp element(s) – John Greacen
Determine whether CourtEvent should be expanded to include multiple documents – Cabral, Graham, and Harris (Gary Graham will serve as chair)
Supporting multiple formats for the same document – Cabral, Durham and McElrath (Rex McElrath will serve as chair)
Development of criteria for inclusion of data elements within the core ECF filing message, within each ECF case type message, and as local extensions, and application of those criteria to the list of additional child support elements submitted by Rex McElrath and to Shane Durham’s request for inclusion of metadata elements for the amount of damages demanded and judgment amount – Bousquin, Cabral, Came, Clarke, and McElrath (Tom Clarke will serve as chair)
Expansion of ECF for purposes of appellate e-filing – Durham, Graham, Greacen, and McElrath (Gary Graham will serve as chair)
Expansion of ECF for purposes of civil traffic, ordinance violations, and parking cases – Bousquin and Harris (Jim Harris will serve as chair)
Discussion
Status of the ECF implementation technical assistance effort
Jim Cabral reported on the status of the TC’s provision of technical assistance to implementers of the ECF 3.0 specification. The LegalXML Member Section provided $8,000 in funding to support this outreach effort. Maricopa County chose to procure assistance on its own and did not call on TC funds for this purpose. Funds were spent to assist the New York Unified Court System. $5342 remains in the contract. The LegalXML Member Section Steering Committee has decided to ask OASIS to redirect that funding to drafting of the ECF 2007 release.
Creation of a structure for drafting the ECF 2007 release
Tom Clarke recommended that the TC create a small group to oversee the drafting of all of the ECF 2007 changes. The TC adopted that suggestion and appointed Cabral, Came, Clarke, Durham and Harris to that group. Tom Clarke will serve as the group’s chair. The small group will post all of its recommendations and their rationale on the list for vetting and discussion during TC conference telephone calls.
Jim Cabral expressed doubt that the work of small groups, detailed drafting, vetting, editing, and formal approval through the KAVI voting process could be completed for the next ECF release by the end of January 2007. The TC decided to extend the timeframe for the next release through March 2007, with the understanding that it will be completed prior to the April TC meeting in San Diego in conjunction with the OASIS Symposium so that the April meeting can be devoted to issues associated with NIEM and the 2008 release.
Miscellaneous issues assigned to Jim Cabral
Jim Cabral reported on the following issues:
Bar number – The 2007 release will incorporate the GJXDM bar number element within the judicialOfficial type. This was an obvious oversight in ECF 3.0
Person ID/ IDref – The next release will resolve this issue. It, too, was an oversight in ECF 3.0.
PersonOtherID can be used for additional person identifiers. Subsequent discussion suggested the need for additional elements for the purposes of vendor billing numbers, filer internal filing submission identification numbers, and identifiers for batches of filings. The drafting small group will recommend elements or structures for these purposes.
Schema validation issues – Shane Durham reported that LexisNexis did not encounter ECF 3.0 validation problems other than those associated with the incorporation of external schemas. Rex McElrath reported that Georgia wrote its own schemas based on the ECF schemas and did not encounter validation problems. Maricopa County will provide Jim Cabral with details of the validation problems it encountered and Jim will resolve those issues before the next ECF release.
Additional schema instances – Jim Cabral is relying on Maricopa County to provide additional, more sophisticated schema instances to incorporate into the 2007 release.
Batch filings
The TC discussed batch filings. It has always taken the position that a filing can include multiple filings, but only if they relate to the same case in the same court. The use case for batch filings (for instance, of multiple petitions to collect debts) involves the filing of documents in multiple cases, including documents initiating multiple cases. They are generally filed within the same court. The TC members present do not want to change the TC’s longstanding approach to the limitations on a single filing message. Shane Durham suggested that the issue be handled by allowing multiple ECF filing messages within a single Web Services transaction. The members present agreed with that approach, noting that its implementation will require extensive changes to the Web Services Service Interaction Profile. After discussion, it was agreed that this modification will be postponed until the 2008 ECF release.
Shane Durham’s proposed additions
The meeting turned next to issues raised by Shane Durham arising out of the File & Serve batch filing application’s implementation of ECF 3.0:
Enhance ECF ‘policy’ to support context restrictions. Shane reported the need to be able to differentiate lists of valid document types by case type. He also noted the utility of being able to limit the use of particular document types within even more limited contexts. For instance, a complaint cannot be filed in an existing case – only to initiate a new case. It is also useful to differentiate between document types that can be filed only by court officials – such as notices and orders – and those that can be filed by outside users. Shane suggested that the latter “context” limitations be included in a simple comment field that would not be machine readable. Other options discussed included filter criteria and x-pass assertions. Some members expressed skepticism concerning the wisdom of allowing indefinite nesting of policy elements. Robert O’Brien noted that the Canada system developed by LexisNexis includes many of these features and can serve as a model for an expanded ECF court policy model. The group noted the possible need to specify which versions of popular software products a court will support, noting that Microsoft’s Office 2007 product is not compatible with its 2003 product. After discussion, this issue was delegated for resolution by a small group consisting of DeFillipis, Durham, Harris and O’Brien. Shane Durham will serve as chair.
Enhance ECF to support multiple filing parties. The ECF schema currently permits only one filing party to be expressed for a particular document. While there will always be a single filer, filings are often filed on behalf of multiple parties in a case. The consensus was that this is a valid requirement, which can be accommodated by a simple cardinality change. The issue will be resolved by the drafting small group.
Enhance ECF to permit the expression of multiple filing-related fees. The getFee Query returns a single filing fee amount. Some courts want to be able to break that amount down to differentiate the amount of the basic court filing fee from a transaction fee charged for efiling. Jim Cabral explained that the payment receipt message, which is adopted from UBL, does include a structure for expressing multiple components of a fee. This same structure can be incorporated into the getFee Query response message. This issue will be resolved by the drafting small group.
Enhance ECF to permit the expression of implementation-specific timestamps. The ECF specification currently includes multiple timestamps – the date and file of submission by a filer, the date and time of receipt by the court, the date and time of recording in the court’s record, and an “official” date and time of filing (which can be, but need not be, one of the other timestamps). Some LexisNexis customers want to be able to report the date and time that the court review function was completed. John Greacen reported that the federal rules accord significance to the date and time a filing is “entered on the court docket,” which is different from the date and time of filing. Some future dates run from the entered on docket date rather than from the date of filing, based on the assumption that all parties have constructive notice of an event at the time it is noted on the court’s docket because of their historic duty to remain aware of the docket at all times. Robert O’Brien noted that in some court business processes, the date and time of completion of clerk review is not the same as the date and time that a filing is recorded in the docket or register of actions, because these processes are not performed by the same person. The TC recognized the legitimacy of this requirement and delegated to John Greacen responsibility for proposing an element name(s) and definition(s) to meet the requirement.
Do not require a court event to be expressed in the case details of an accepted filing. The current ECF schema uses docketedCaseType to convey information about the case into which an accepted filing has been docketed. This element includes as a mandatory element one or more courtEvent elements. LexisNexis would like this element to be made optional. There may not be a courtEvent established in response to a filing. The TC agreed with this reasoning; the drafting small group will resolve this issue.
During the course of the discussion of the courtEvent element, Gary Graham questioned whether courtEvent should accommodate multiple documents. The current schema supports referencing a single document to an event. Some reservations were expressed about making any major change to the domain model for this purpose. This issue was delegated to Cabral, Graham and Harris to resolve, with Gary Graham to serve as chair of the group.
Enhance ECF to express ‘judgment amounts’ related to collection cases. At the time of filing, a civil case will include an “ad damnum” amount – the amount of damages sought. A civil judgment will include an amount of damages awarded; it may include other terms as well. LexisNexis would like to express these amounts as metadata associated with new filings and orders. After discussion of the use case for this additional information, the matter was delegated to the “additional elements” group established to review proposed additional child support elements.
Enhance ECF to better express party-attorney relationships. The intended use of caseAttorneyRole is not very clear, with the possibility of multiple IDrefs without any indication of which “ref” corresponds to a party and which to an attorney. The use of this element will be clarified in the specification. The solution to the issue lies in the improved handling of relationships that will be included in the NIEM 2.0 data model scheduled for release in the second quarter of 2007. This solution will be reflected in the ECF 2008 release.
ECF may need to address externally-defined schemas. One of the features of ECF 3.0 is the incorporation of other XML standards, in addition to the GJXDM. LexisNexis’ development partners have encountered problems with accessing these externally-defined schemas, especially if they are accessed through the Internet on a real time basis. The TC members suggested that implementers maintain locally cached copies of all externally-defined schemas and use the schemaLocation attribute to point to these locally cached versions. Shane Durham asked that the TC consider distributing the xsd.s of all referenced schemas as part of the ECF specification documentation. This issue will be resolved by the drafting small group.
2007 face to face meeting dates and locations
Prior to the scheduled conference call on Wednesday, the TC members present in Las Vegas established the following dates and places for 2007 face to face meetings:
April 18th (afternoon) and 19th – San Diego, California (in conjunction with OASIS symposium). This year, OASIS will provide TC meeting rooms at the symposium hotel at no charge.
July 12th (afternoon) and 13th – Chicago, Illinois (in conjunction with NACM annual meeting). The Thursday afternoon meeting will overlap with the NACM annual meeting program; the Friday meeting will follow the NACM meeting.
October 4th and 5th – Tampa, Florida (in conjunction with, and following, the 2007 NCSC Court Technology Conference)
December 5th and 6th – Las Vegas, Nevada (provisional, depending on the amount of work to be transacted)
Wednesday conference call
No members participated in the conference call on Wednesday afternoon.
Election of officers for the 2007 calendar year
The election of officers was a specially scheduled item of business for the Wednesday afternoon conference call.
TC created a new position of Associate Editor and elected the following officers for the 2007 calendar year:
Public Sector Co-chair – Tom Clarke
Private Sector Co-chair – John Greacen
Representative to LegalXML Member Section Steering Committee – Roger Winters
Secretary – Robin Gibson
Webmaster – George Knecht
Editor – Roger Winters
Associate Editor – Adam Angione
George Knecht and Adam Angione are new to the TC leadership. We appreciate their willingness to serve.
Review of proposed revised charter
John Greacen reviewed the proposed changes in the TC charter. The charter has not been revised since the TC was established in 2001. An earlier proposed revision was rejected by OASIS on the grounds that its deliverables were not sufficiently defined and its deliverable deadlines were too general. The TC decided at that time to postpone further consideration of the charter until it had completed the transition to the Royalty Free on Limited Terms IPR mode. That transition was completed successfully earlier this year.
The TC reviewed with some care the description of deliverables included in the revised charter, adding an emphasis on implementation of the service MDE, refining the description of appellate enhancements, and identifying appellate, civil traffic, local ordinance violations, and parking cases as having the highest priority for inclusion into the ECF specification. A draft of the charter incorporating the changes adopted by the TC is circulated to the membership along with these minutes.
The discussion of service noted that no jurisdiction has yet chosen to implement the service module as designed by the TC. In Georgia, filings are transmitted to the sheriff via the service message for printing and service by hand; returns of service are sent electronically thorough the ECF message structure to the child support enforcement agency. In Maricopa County, electronic service is performed through email when a party or attorney consents to that form of service. In King County, the court conducts service when an attorney opts into the electronic service process; the attorney is responsible for maintaining his or her current electronic address on the system.
The discussion noted the existence of two separate use cases – a centralized service process in which one entity (the court or a vendor) is responsible for service and a distributed process in which multiple vendors perform service collaboratively with each other. The ECF 3.0 specification does not deal explicitly with the latter model.
Brian Hickman, who is responsible for leading a re-examination of the service module after the first of the year, suggested that a better solution may begin with a requirement that all participating entities simply expose their service lists to the other entities. Maricopa County exposes its internal court service list – used to disseminate court notices and orders – to external users. The court limits that list to parties and attorneys; it does not update the list to include other persons requesting copies of all filings.
Groups were established for developing the appellate and civil traffic, local ordinance and parking ECF enhancements. For purposes of appellate e-filing, the group consists of Durham, Graham, Greacen, and McElrath. Gary Graham will serve as chair. For purposes of civil traffic, ordinance violations, and parking cases, the group consists of Bousquin and Harris, with Jim Harris serving as chair.
Including free text and sequence indicators for fully marked up XML documents
Rex McElrath and Dr. Laurence Leff presented a report concluding that there is no conflict or overlap between the ECFTC and eContracts TC specifications. The paper discussed the differences between the approaches used by the two specifications. Because of its dependence on the GJXDM, ECF 3.0 is more data centric than the draft eContracts specification, which focuses on marking up the structure of a document, following the approach taken in the Court Document 1.1 specification.
The discussion concluded that there will be no change in ECF 3.0 for the 2007 release for the purpose of better representing free text. Rex McElrath noted that the current specification works well for marking up data fields in forms, and that the Electronic Filing Court Documents Subcommittee continues to work on the mark up of free text. One of the hurdles they continue to face is the lack of adequate authoring tools to support any of the proposed mark up approaches.
Roger Winters offered to serve as co-chair of the Court Documents Subcommittee to stimulate greater activity on the subcommittee list and his appointment was confirmed by the TC members present.
Use of MTOM for attachments
Jim Cabral noted that MTOM is now mature and should be incorporated into the specification and into the Web Services Service Interaction Profile as the method for representing attachments. This change will be incorporated into the 2007 ECF release.
Proposals for representing alternative forms of the same document.
George Knecht presented an analysis of the issue – the need on occasion to file two versions of the same document (e.g., a pdf and a native word processing form of the same document, for instance for proposed orders so that the court will have both an official version of the document and an editable version for the judge’s use in preparing his or her order). This should be distinguished from the filing of an amended version of the same document. In the former use case, the documents are identical; they are merely presented in two different formats. In the latter use case, the documents are different. George presented three alternatives that he and Rex McElrath had developed, recommending addition of a new document:FormatVersionRelatedDocumentID element to Document/ExtendedDocumentDescriptiveMetadata to indicate the relationship between two identical documents.
Shane Durham suggested an alternative approach, in which the alternative format version would be nested within the structure for official version of the document, not submitted as a separate document. After discussion, the group decided to pursue Shane’s alternative. Detailed implementation of this suggestion was delegated to a group composed of Cabral, Durham and McElrath. Rex McElrath will serve as chair.
Additional child support elements
Rex McElrath presented a spreadsheet containing almost one hundred additional elements that Georgia included in its child support schema. Discussion noted that some of the data elements – such as employer data – should probably be added to the ECF core message. Additional items should probably be added to the domestic relations case type message. The group was also of the view that adding all of the child support elements would make the ECF specification too large and unwieldy and that it opened the specification to the “slippery slope” of never-ending expansion to accommodate detailed metadata desired for specific case types. The group was unsure of the relationship between the ECF specification and IEPDs developed to support specialized exchanges.
The larger issue of the criteria to be used to decide whether to include elements within the ECF core and case type messages or when and how to leave them to case type specific IEPDs was delegated for further study and resolution by a small group consisting of Bousquin, Cabral, Came, Clarke, and McElrath. Tom Clarke will serve as chair. The group will not only propose general criteria, but will also apply them to the list of elements proposed by Rex McElrath. It will also make a recommendation on inclusion of the “ad damnum” and judgment amounts metadata requested by LexisNexis.
Addition of a structure for identifying a self-represented litigant
Shane Durham described the mechanism used by LexisNexis for this purpose – pointing the existing attorney and party elements to each other. He does not believe that any modification of the schemas is needed for this purpose. The TC agreed with his recommendation. Scott Came is relieved of further responsibility for this issue. The matter will be resolved by the drafting small group.
Report of the Outreach Subcommittee
The charter of this subcommittee was approved by the TC membership the week prior to the Las Vegas face-to-face meeting. Jim Harris and Roger Winters presented the subcommittee’s proposed communications plan, which identifies target audiences and various products and media that would be useful in reaching them.
One issue noted by the subcommittee in its plan was the availability of resources. John Messing, LegalXML Member Section Steering Committee chair, reported that the Steering Committee had decided to devote all available resources for 2007 to development and enhancement of specifications for the eNotary and ECF technical committees. No funds will be available to support outreach efforts. The subcommittee has the support of the co-chairs in recruiting volunteers to carry out its outreach vision.
The TC accepted the committee’s work product, with thanks for its thoroughness, and made a number of suggestions:
- being more aggressive in its efforts to create an ECF user group which would meet in conjunction with other court events. The TC supports the recruitment of CITOC to drive the creation of a user group and, more broadly, to drive implementation of ECF specifications;
- focusing on marketing ECF to vendors, including case management information system vendors (including the use of the Forum for Advancement of Court Technology for this purpose); and
- creating a discussion group for exchanging implementation experiences.
George Knecht agreed to create a discussion group on the Maricopa County website, post all existing implementation documentation and lessons learned reports, and monitor the exchange of information among ECF implementers on the discussion group. The TC gratefully accepted his offer.
At the April face to face meeting in San Diego, the Outreach Subcommittee will present a final version of the ECF 3.0 technical guide for approval.
Use case for inclusion of property records elements within the ECF specification
Mark Ladd submitted an analysis of the circumstances in which property records custodians and courts might desire to share property records in electronic form. His analysis concluded that both the PRIA and ECF specifications are sufficiently advanced that making substantial modifications to either to accommodate this use case is unlikely. He suggests, instead, that work focus on mapping between the two structures to facilitate exchanges between the property records and courts communities. The TC accepted that recommendation and asked Mark to suggest a mechanism for accomplishing this objective.
Definition of the ECF 2007 release
The TC reviewed its previous discussions and established the following list of contents for the ECF 2007 release:
Making changes to implement decisions on Tom Carlson-identified definitional/mapping issues resolved in New York and by conference telephone call
Including GJXDM bar number structure
Resolving the person identifier - ID/IDref issue
Including additional person-related transactional case identifiers
Resolving schema validation issues
Adding court filing policy enhancements to express hierarchies and context
Allowing multiple filing parties for a filing
Allowing for differentiated filing-related fees in the response to the getFee Query
Adding an additional timestamp(s) for filing processing events
Not requiring courtEvent in the document complete message
Possibly expanding courtEvent to include multiple documents
Possibly including demand and judgment amount metadata
Improving directions for the use of externally defined schemas – option of using schemaLocation attribute to refer to locally cached copy of external schema and explore distribution of the externally defined schemas
Modifying the Web Services Service Interaction Profile to specify MTOM for attachments
Adding a structure to support multiple versions of the same document
Adding child support elements
Including Shane Durham’s self represented litigant solution in the specification
Adding more sophisticated schema instances
The TC concluded that the appropriate release designation for this content would be ECF 3.1, because nothing in it will make its use incompatible with ECF 3.0 or ECF 3.01.
The ECF 3.1 release will document all changes made to the specification.
Based on this list, Jim Cabral will prepare a quote for preparing both the 2007 and 2008 ECF releases for consideration by the co-chairs, the LegalXML Member Section Steering Committee, and the management of OASIS.
Jim Cabral and the co-chairs will establish a specific timetable for drafting, vetting, editing, and formal KAVI approval of the ECF 3.1 specification.
Appellate enhancements
Gary Graham asked for preliminary guidance on the development of appellate enhancements. Will appellate elements be included in a separate appellate case type structure or be included within each of the existing case type structures? Appellate courts deal with appeals of all case types. The TC decided to include appellate-specific elements as a new appellate case type. Can a filing message draw elements from multiple case types? A positive answer to this question is necessary to accommodate the proposed structure just described, in which an appellate filing in a criminal case would draw upon both appellate and criminal case type data elements and structures. Jim Cabral noted that the current structure requires a choice among the existing case types. The structure will have to be revised to allow for the use of multiple case type structures in a single filing message. It is not clear whether this revision will be included within the 2007 or 2008 ECF release.
Thursday conference call
John Greacen reviewed the decisions made during the preceding day and half with the members who joined by conference telephone call.
Don Bergeron suggested that the naming and design rules methodology could be used for the PRIA/ECF mapping exercise.
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