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Articles & Vaporware by Jim McMillan
About Jim McMillan

 
We have great ideas!

Articles and other work by Jim McMillan

I created the model represented in this article, Case Management Systems in 1988.  It attempts to explain why automated court case management systems are difficult to design, code and implement. A recent addendum to the model can be found here called "The Fifth Bubble".

In 1998, we were awarded a grant by Lexis-Nexis to study the potential for XML technology in the courts.  In particular, we wanted to explore the potential universe of data that is collected in court case management systems.  The two following papers report on our findings and contain links to spreadsheets that contain the case management system field listings.  This first paper was created for CTC6 and contains a basic description of XML: XML for Courts. The second paper: XML Project Draft Paper is the result of the grant project.

The following three papers build upon a theme of an increasingly electronic court system that can effectively use e-documents and new workload measurement:

1. Technology Trends and the Practice of Law - Singapore, 1995

2. Court Technology in 2007 - CTC5

3. Managing Dockets and Caseload - A New Electronic World ABA Judges' Journal Special Technology Issue (Winter 2000)

Judicial Electronic Document and Data Interchange (JEDDI) - once upon a time, before the Internet and XML, there were a group of dreamers that believed that the court and legal world would one day be connected electronically.  The following papers describe ideas and concepts that are still being developed today.  Some of the dreamers are still here and are working on their dreams:

1. The Need for National Standards for Judicial EDI (1991)

2. Judicial Electronic Document and Data Interchange (JEDDI) - A Roadmap (1994)

3. Jeddi for Beginners

4. Courts in the 21st Century: Toward the Electronic Court

From May 5-7, 1993, thirty-five persons from courts, the legal community, and private corporations throughout the USA met in Williamsburg, Virginia.  This workshop was the first attempt to define broad general requirements for participants in the judicial system for electronic filing and electronic data exchange systems.  Click [here] to view or download the valuable and historic results of this meeting.

More recently Tom Carlson and I work on the creation of an open source electronic filing sytems called inCounter. Click [here] for more the inCounter website. As part of that work we wrote three papers. The first paper was a White Paper on problems facing the development of electronic filing systems and a description of the inCounter system. The second paper was on the SOAP Web Services standard and how it relates to court e-filing. And the third paper was on Open-Source Development and why courts should investigate it.

Other things that we work on includes articles about Smart Courthouses and new thinking about Integrated Criminal Justice Systems (ICJIS) that we are currently working on in Orange County, Florida

Vaporware

At CTC4 and CTC5 we created some vaporware with the Toolbook product to demonstrate new ideas regarding potential executive information systems and future decision support systems.  These were "pre-web" types of ideas so please adjust your thinking accordingly.  Since these demonstrations are built in Toolbook, you may just have to run the "page - next" to get thru them since all the buttons aren't active all the time.  That note will make sense once you download, unzip, and run the files.

A future Executive Info System Demonstration from CTC4 in 1996 (link to download the zip file)

Future Decision Support System Demonstration from '97 (link to download the self-extracting executable file)