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Overview

State court systems have a long way to go to achieve true digital capability, and we want to accelerate that timeline. Thanks to a generous grant from the Knight Foundation, Civera partnered with MassINC to explore new paradigms of publishing and consuming court records. Our discovery process involved dozens of interviews with a variety of stakeholder groups to craft a prototype to make court filings not only easier for court staff to manage, but simple for attorneys, journalists, and the public to explore and analyze. We also surveyed over 20 statewide court search portals to assess potential improvements.

The Result

We ended up with a beautiful and powerful statewide search solution that can handle millions of court cases and improves upon existing systems:

Benefits

A Powerful Solution

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Stop Hiding What is Public

This is a corruption of the intent of our constitution which should allow full public view using the prevailing technology. Even of those records which are online, the MA court system requires you to be a lawyer or institution in order to obtain a login, otherwise you have to travel to a courthouse and use the online system while physically in the clerk’s office.
Read More +

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Remove the Barriers to Finding Context

The public often discovers new insight into a civic issue by reading a news story. The web is particularly adapted to allowing the reader to dig deeper by clicking a link and diving into more detailed documentation. Thus, the online court record platform should make filings freely available. This would allow a citizen, scholar, blogger, or other journalist to read a news story about a court case, click the link in an article, and instantly begin exploring the source documents upon which the story was built. This will also provide a wisdom of the crowds effect to oversee the quality of the news story itself. “Crowd-checking” to provide basic fact-checking and bias detection.
Read More +

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Answer Unanswered Questions

Sometimes one reads a news story about a controversial court case and one is left with far more unresolved questions. With online court records, one could dive into the facts of a case and begin to piece together the subject of the court case to help bring more understanding, and perhaps write a follow-up piece to help readers get closer to the truth. Currently, it is rare for news stories to provide links to any court document the story writes about.
Read More +

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Strengthen Droves of Citizen Journalists

Just as superior audio and video equipment combined with platforms like YouTube, have made it possible for millions of average people to produce and distribute professional-grade multimedia art at an unprecedented scale, so did blogging platforms allow the same people to gain influence in the great debates that shape our cities, states, and nation, and world. These bloggers do not have the budgets to travel to courthouses and pull paper records. Let us help them spend their time more productively: thinking, synthesizing, and writing new ideas. The infrastructure carrying our democracy’s data — including that of our court systems — must be improved to keep pace with the explosive gains in online publishing technology. Let’s empower millions of the next generation to research and analyze the records of justice. Let’s allow millions more lights to shine on our democracy than was never before possible. We will progress with a more diverse palette of policy and procedural insight, at a faster pace than ever before.
Read More +

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Keep a Watchful Eye on Members of the Court

Incompetent public defenders, prosecutors, judges, and private attorneys can be identified and nominated for intervention or assistance based on inadequacies detected in filings.
Read More +

Features

CourtDocs outperforms most statewide systems.

Feature CourtDocs Most State-wide Court Systems
Search Full, flexible statewide power search. Beautiful user interface. Siloed search, within each courthouse. Required fields.
Docket Alerts/ Case Tracking Unlimited case tracking for any user, for any case in the system. Only for logged-in attorneys and only for cases they have registered an appearance.
Case Documents Pilot: Case files can be purchased and delivered digitally. No case files or documents available.
Data and Statistics Raw CSV/Excel files of all case data, perfect for analysis. None, only as yearly PDF narrative reports.
Page Sharing Cases and search results are shareable. Pages don’t have shareable URL links.
Rule/Statute References Citations mouse-over links to reveal relevant rules/statutes. Plain text, as shown in the docket.
Error Corrections Users can send corrections and feedback on each case. No error correction process.

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Stop Hiding What is Public

This is a corruption of the intent of our constitution which should allow full public view using the prevailing technology. Even of those records which are online, the MA court system requires you to be a lawyer or institution in order to obtain a login, otherwise you have to travel to a courthouse and use the online system while physically in the clerk’s office.

null

Remove the Barriers to Finding Context

The public often discovers new insight into a civic issue by reading a news story. The web is particularly adapted to allowing the reader to dig deeper by clicking a link and diving into more detailed documentation. Thus, the online court record platform should make filings freely available. This would allow a citizen, scholar, blogger, or other journalist to read a news story about a court case, click the link in an article, and instantly begin exploring the source documents upon which the story was built. This will also provide a wisdom of the crowds effect to oversee the quality of the news story itself. “Crowd-checking” to provide basic fact-checking and bias detection.

null

Answer Unanswered Questions

Sometimes one reads a news story about a controversial court case and one is left with far more unresolved questions. With online court records, one could dive into the facts of a case and begin to piece together the subject of the court case to help bring more understanding, and perhaps write a follow-up piece to help readers get closer to the truth. Currently, it is rare for news stories to provide links to any court document the story writes about.

null

Strengthen Droves of Citizen Journalists

Just as superior audio and video equipment combined with platforms like YouTube, have made it possible for millions of average people to produce and distribute professional-grade multimedia art at an unprecedented scale, so did blogging platforms allow the same people to gain influence in the great debates that shape our cities, states, and nation, and world. These bloggers do not have the budgets to travel to courthouses and pull paper records.

Let us help them spend their time more productively: thinking, synthesizing, and writing new ideas. The infrastructure carrying our democracy’s data — including that of our court systems — must be improved to keep pace with the explosive gains in online publishing technology. Let’s empower millions of the next generation to research and analyze the records of justice. Let’s allow millions more lights to shine on our democracy than was never before possible. We will progress with a more diverse palette of policy and procedural insight, at a faster pace than ever before.

null

Keep a Watchful Eye on Members of the Court

Incompetent public defenders, prosecutors, judges, and private attorneys can be identified and nominated for intervention or assistance based on inadequacies detected in filings.