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Statewide and National Digital Evidence Repositories: What It Takes to Run One

A county evidence system has one owner. A statewide repository has several, none of whom report to each other, and that single structural difference ...

The Digital Exhibit Lifecycle: Marking, Offering, Admitting, and the Exhibit List

Police manage evidence. Courts manage exhibits. The difference between those two sentences is the act of admission, and it is the reason digital ...

Data Ownership, Portability, and Avoiding Vendor Lock-In in Court Systems

The court owns its record. Everyone agrees with that sentence, and it settles almost nothing about court data portability or vendor lock-in.

Remote and Hybrid Hearings: Evidence, the Record, and Public Access

Courts adopted remote hearings under emergency conditions and then discovered they were not going back. Judges who moved to remote appearances have ...

Exhibits in a Virtual Hearing: Access, Control, and the Record

Courts worrying about presenting evidence in a virtual hearing usually frame it as a conferencing problem. It rarely is. Teams, Zoom, and Webex all ...

Language Access in the Courts: Transcription and Translation Obligations

A court has to be understood by the people appearing in front of it, and it has to produce an accurate record of what was said. When a hearing runs ...

Procuring Court Technology Through International Frameworks

A judiciary running a donor-funded modernization program frequently does not sign the contract for the technology it will use. Court technology ...

Measuring Court Performance: Backlog, Adjournments, and Time to Disposition

Court performance backlog measurement is usually treated as a reporting obligation attached to the end of a program. The judiciaries that have ...

Finding the Moment a Statement Was Made

Finding the Moment a Statement Was Made

A witness says something on day two. On day six, counsel says the witness said something different. The judge needs to know what was actually said, ...

AI Translation of Judgments, Documents, and the Spoken Record

A judgment is delivered to the parties. If a party cannot read it, the delivery was formal rather than actual, and in jurisdictions where a ...

Can AI Transcription Be Trusted With the Official Court Record?

Asking whether AI transcription is accurate enough for court is the wrong question, because accuracy is not a single number and the record is not a ...

Livestreaming Court Proceedings: Public Access Without Losing Control

Open justice is a principle with an implementation problem. Courts are public, the public increasingly expects to watch remotely, and livestreaming ...

Archiving Court Proceedings: Retention, Retrieval, and the Long Tail

Court proceeding archive retention is a problem that hides for years and then arrives all at once. A court records hearings, the files accumulate, ...

Sequencing a Court Digitalization Program: What to Do First

Sequencing a Court Digitalization Program: What to Do First

Court digitalization roadmap sequencing decides more about a program's outcome than product selection does. The same components, in a different ...

Running a Judicial Digitalization Program

Running a Judicial Digitalization Program

Between 2020 and 2021, court digitalization reform moved further and faster than in the preceding decade. World Bank data tracks the share of ...

Digitizing a Court's Paper Backlog

Digitizing a Court's Paper Backlog

Court records digitization projects fail in a specific and repeatable way. A judiciary funds scanning, boxes are collected, images are produced, and ...

Data Sovereignty and Deployment Choices for National Judiciaries

Data Sovereignty and Deployment Choices for National Judiciaries

For most enterprises, deployment is an engineering and cost decision. For a national judiciary it frequently is not, because court data sovereignty ...

Verifying an Exhibit From the Bench

Verifying an Exhibit From the Bench

Search for guidance on digital evidence integrity and you will find a great deal of it, written almost entirely for the party preserving the ...