[legalxml-courtfiling] Minutes Meeting October 3rd and October 4th 2002

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Subject: [legalxml-courtfiling] Minutes Meeting October 3rd and October 4th 2002




From: "Dr. Laurence Leff" <>
To: 
Date: Mon, 04 Nov 2002 12:28:49 -0600 (CST)






                Minutes Meeting of October 3 2002 and October 4th 
                             in Boston, Massachusetts 
The OASIS Legal XML Member Section Electronic Court Filing Technical Committee

These minutes cover both the Conference call from 15:00 to 17:00 Eastern 
Daylight Time on October 3rd and the Face-To-Face held for two full days on 
October 3rd and October 4th.

The abbreviation *TC* or *(TC)* means that the action was conducted and/or 
ratified during the formal Teleconference.  Items without the *(TC)* prefix 
occurred only at the Face to Face but not during the teleconference.

*(TC)* Present at the Teleconference:
Mohyeddin Abdulaziz,
John Aerts,
Gregory W. Arnold,
Donald Bergeron,
Terrie Bousquin,
Rolly Chambers
Tom Clarke
Shane Durham, 
John Greacen,
Daniel Greenwood
Laurence Leff,
Diane Lewis,
John Messing,
Gary Poindexter
Moira O'Leary Rowley,
John Ruegg,
Roger Winters,

The Committee thanked the meeting host, Mr. Daniel Greenwood, of the 
Massachussetts of Institute of Technology Electronic Commerce Architecture 
Project. 

*(TC)* John Greacen called the official Teleconference to order.

*(TC)* John Greacen announced that the Joint Technology Committee approved the
Court Filing 1.1.  Their comment period closes October 21st 2002.

(Hereafter, the phrase "Joint Technology Committee"
includes the National Consortium for State Court Automation Standards, 
a subcommittee of the Joint Technology Committee of the Conference of State 
Court Administrators (COSCA) and National Association for Court Management 
(NACM))  

*(TC)* Donald Bergeron discussed the OASIS Legal XML Member Section Steering 
Committee activities.  They will be electing a Steering committee ninety days 
after the fourth Technical Committee has its first meeting.  It will consist 
of a representative from each of the technical committees and three members 
elected at large from the Legal XML Member Section.  

*(TC)* The Organization of Structured Information Standards (OASIS) board will 
approve a policy that each Legal XML Member Section Technical Committee have 
our Intellectual Property policy in its charter from the Legal XML Member Section.

*(TC)* The Legal XML Member Section Steering Committee will be sizing the work 
of updating the legacy documents such as unofficial notes that existed prior
to the joining with OASIS.   This work will be funded from the old LegalXML.org

*(TC)*  The Technical Committee approved
the Legal XML TC's "Process for TC Specifications and Other Deliverables"
prepared by Roger Winters.  Mr. Winters announced that work is commencing
on using the official OASIS templates for XML Specifications.

*(TC)* The Technical Committee approved the Query Response proposal.  John 
Messing expressed concern about the "authentication" place holder.  It was 
decided to leave this as a placeholder pending future work in this area.  
No one had any objections to Query&Response being a proposed Technical 
Committee Specification with a final posting to the list to be resolved 
by November 4th.  

*(TC)* The Court Document Standard will be a Candidate Proposed Specification

*(TC)* The Court Policy Requirements document will be given a one week
moderated comment period.  

*(TC)* Mr. Bergeron talked about his "Unofficial Note" on Court Policy.

*(TC)* Mr. Khaleel Thotti will be identifying the items in Court Filing and
Court Document where a policy must be expressed

*(TC)* The California Administrative Office of the Courts had a conference 
call with Mr. Greacen and others from this Technical Committee on October 1st.
In this conference call they stated they will be preparing the next generation 
of XML standards, will be doing it themselves with the assistance of Todd
Vincent and will be involving vendors.  They will also be doing 
interoperability testing.  The result will be separate XML electronic filing
standards for California.

*(TC)*  California will continue to participate in the Technical Committee, but
will devote most of their energies of their own effort.   They
will "throw over the fence" their work product to the Technical Committee for
its consideration as a national standard.

Management Technology Group (MTG) will serve as California's contractor for
the development of specifications for integrated justice in a parallel
effort to develop the next generation of such specifications for California.

*(TC)* This Technical Committee recognizes that an independent effort can be
valuable to move standard efforts forward.  Mr. Greacen will prepare a letter 
to Mr. Bill Vickery of the California AOC stating this and expressing the 
TC's desire to work with them.  To encourage them to do so, the 
Technical Committee will offer to

1) *(TC)*Meet their time lines, pointing out that in the past, the Technical
   Committee always met the time framework when participants had 
   business needs
2) *(TC)*Allow Mr. Tom Smith to chair the Court Filing 2.0 subcommittee.  
3) *(TC)*Offer our List Server 
4) *(TC)*Offer our conference call plan, 
5) *(TC)*Offer our relationships with COSCA/NACM and XML.gov.

*(TC)* In the event that California does not accept this offer, the TC's fallback
position will be to ask for representation on their committee.  Mr. Tom Clarke
was the suggested contact.  And, if this is not acceptable, then
our last fallback position will be to request regular reports.

*(TC)* The Technical Committee will continue to push its own agenda.  It has 
concern that some vendors may have their efforts divided between California
and those of this Technical Committee.  Also, we are concerned about
issues of Intellectual Property and whether the TC would be able to use the
California work product.

*(TC)*  Messrs. John Aerts and John Ruegg will find out more about the
California-specific integrated justice specifications.

The Technical Committee also noted the California's concerns regarding speed
and documentation of the architecture and work to update our work product to
XML Schema.  The Technical Committee recognizes that some of their criticisms 
were valid.

Mr. Don Bergeron will work on the documentation of the overall architecture.
He will share his result with the OXCI group.  A concern was expressed that
Mr. Bergeron's company might wish to bid in response to the OXCI group
Request for Proposal. The OXCI group will be careful to maintain an
appropriate "arm's length relationship" with him so as not to preclude
vendor participation by his company.

*(TC)* The Court Policy will be developed using as resources: Mr. Khaleel
Thoti of Nebraska, Dr. Leff of Western Illinois University, and Ms. Diane
Lewis of the US Department of Justice.

*(TC)* The Technical Committee will work with Global on an object-oriented
schema for criminal justice.  This is part of the Justice XML Data Dictionary
Schema Tax Force (JXDDS) sponsored by the Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI)
Our Technical Committee is looking for people with experience in 
object-oriented systems in Criminal Justice to work on this effort.

Mr. Rolly Chambers will develop a list of roles for this effort.  

*(TC)* The Certification Committee stated that they completed a "Statement 
of Work"

*(TC)* Ms. Lewis reported on other groups with which this Technical Committee
should liaison.  She contacted the American Bar Association which has formed
its own committee to look into electronic filing.  Both the chair and vice chair of that committee - John Messing and Rolly Chambers -- are long time members of this Technical Committee (and of the legal XML work group that preceded it).  
She will also contact the Administrative Office of the United States federal 
court system.  She expressed concern that it is best to liaison with 
organizations as opposed to individuals.

*(TC)* Prior to the meeting, the Query and Response Subcommittee forwarded to 
the  list their draft.  They also forwarded  several issues to the list.
This latter list of questions was forwarded to the list on August 27th.
The TC resolved these issues as indicated below.

1. *(TC)* The technical committee decided to put the "normative queries" in
   a separate document.  This would allow them to be changed or added to without
   having a new revision of the Query and Response proposal.

2. *(TC)* The technical committee decided to return elements, including
   compound elements, in response to queries.  These would correspond to the 
   structures defined in Court Filing 1.1.
   For example, an Actor element from the Court Filing DTD would be returned 
   in a ResponseRow where appropriate.

   The TC chose to supplement the CourtFiling element set with additional
   independent elements (both simple and compound) , where necessary, to
   express CMS data for the Query&Response functionality.  (Those discussed 
   supplements were 'CaseActorStatus' and 'docketEntry').

3. *(TC)* A new element will be defined called docketEntry.  It will be returned
   as part of the ResponseRow for appropriate queries.  

4. *(TC)* If there is something required by the DTD, but the court does not 
   wish to return a element, it will return a nil element.

5. *(TC)* Subelements rather than attributes will be used in the query and 
   response proposal.  This was for consistency with the Court Filing 
   specification.

6. *(TC)* No totalParameters will be used in the query.  The processor 
   receiving the query would simply count the parameters to see how many 
   there are or use facilities from the parser.

7. *(TC)* The technical committee should include an additional Normative
   Query, GetActorList.

8. *(TC)* The Query and Response will include a sample dtd to be included as
   part of the proposed Court Policy DTD.  It will provide a way for a court to
   publish the queries that it supports and could be used stand alone prior
   to the development of the Court Policy DTD.  This DTD could serve 
   for a court to publish this information until such time as the court policy
   DTD is formulated.

Ms. Moira Rowley has asked to be relieved of the chairmanship of the
CMS-API, Q&R, CDC subcommittee given her new assignment.  Mr. Shane Durham 
has agreed to take on that assignment, subject to approval by his firm.

*(TC)* The Technical Committee goal is to "pick up the pace" of activity.
This will include at least monthly teleconferences in addition to our
face-to-face conferences that occur approximately once per quarter.

The Interoperability Test Criteria for Court Filing 1.1 was developed
further.  The following was decided as prerequisites of these tests:

1) Two interoperability tests involving at least three different OASIS members.

2) Two states would be involved, although not all of the criteria 
below must be present in each of the two states.

3) Three different courts must be involved.

4) More than one Electronic Filing Service Provider must be involved.

5) More than one Electronic Filing Manager (by Court) must be involved.

6) The tests, in totality, must demonstrate one Electronic Filing Manager
receiving filings from multiple Electronic Filing Service Providers.  

7) The tests, in totality, must demonstrate one Electronic Filing Service
Provider sending filings to multiple Electronic Filing Service Providers.

8) A Document Blob must be received by the court.

9) Both Case MetaData as well as metadata about the lead document and its
attachments should go into the Case Management System.

10) The tests must demonstrate a filing with more than one Lead Document.

11) One filing must involve Case Metadata with at least four parties and 
at least four attorneys.

The Technical Committee recognized the efforts at interoperability testing
in Georgia and Seattle.  John Greacen will check with the office of Utah
to determine what interoperability activities they anticipate.

The Court Document 1.1 standard was reviewed during the first part of
Friday's Face-to-Face meeting.

Ms. Lewis of the United States Department of Justice discussed the relationship
between the Court Document standard and the American Bar Association Electronic
Filing Committees.  We distinguished between organization affiliations and
individual members.

Dr. Laurence Leff reported on his work with the current
Court Document standards.  This was the result of his efforts in encoding
criminal justice forms using Court Document 1.1.  (This is available on
the web in http://www.wiu.edu/users/mflll/CriminalJusticeZoo.html.)  
Mr. Chambers reported that some suggestions from this effort were incorporated
in the draft to be posted.  He also said that no provision was made for 
supporting XFORMS.

Dr. Laurence L. Leff will work on using the Court Document standard in
connection with the Order of Protection.  This effort will include
an HTML form that will populate a XML court document.  Then, software
will be prototyped to extract from the XML  the information needed
for NCIC and other databases.

Mr. Chambers stressed that one of his goals was that the XML of a court
document be made to look like a traditional paper document after using a
style sheet.

The Court Document Subcommittee is also working on integrating Digital 
Signature and Phrase type's for frequently used phrases such 
as "and such other relief as the court may consider just."

We also discussed the importance of code lists for various functions including
the roles that persons would take up.

It was also decided that there would be document metadata to indicate
1) which style sheet would be used
2) what browser was used
3) which style sheet processor was used.

It was also mentioned that a court might indicate which style sheets,
browser, and style sheet processor were acceptable in that court in their
Court Policy XML.

The Committee set tentative dates for upcoming teleconferences and
face-to-face meetings:

1) Las Vegas December 12th and December 13th 2002. 
This confirms previous intentions.

2) Atlanta, April 17th and April 18th 2003

3) Washington D. C. Week of July 14th  2003 (in conjunction with the National
   Association for Court Management)

4) Kansas City, Week of October 27th 2003 (in conjunction with the 
   Court Technology Conference Eight)

5) Las Vegas, December 2003, (in conjunction with the Electronic Court Filing
   Conference)

6) Chicago, Spring 2004 (in conjunction with the American Bar Association
   Law Tech Conference)

The Technical Committee also decided to schedule another teleconference
November 5th on Tuesday at 3:00 PM Eastern.

The Chairman of the Technical Committee, along with Ms. Robin Gibson, will 
send out a goal statement for the Court Filing 2.0 standard.  This will include:
  a) Incorporating authentication and integrity issues
  b) incorporate lessons learned
  c) move to a better schema representation.

The Technical Committee decided to put the Court Repository effort on hold 
pending completion of Court Policy.

It is also anticipated that Court Policy will be used with Court Filing 2.0,
as opposed to Court Filing 1.1