Improving Court Case Management, Financial Systems, and Statistical Reporting

Design the Next Generation of Electronic Case Management System for Greater Efficiency, Integration

By the end of fiscal year 2012, over 41 million cases were on the Judiciary’s Case Management/Electronic Case Files (CM/ECF) system, and more than 700,000 attorneys and others had filed documents over the Internet.

CM/ECF revolutionized the way in which the federal courts manage their cases and documents. Now, the transition to a Next Generation of the CM/ECF system is well underway. The requirements-gathering phase of the Next Gen project ended in March 2012, as groups of judges, chambers staff, clerks, court staff, and AO staff identified and prioritized more than 400 functional requirements. Those requirements elicited more than 6,000 comments from the courts. The project also received input from the bar, academia, government agencies, and others. AO developers are now proceeding under a plan for design, coding, testing, and implementation of NextGen. The goal is to improve efficiency and integration among the appellate, district, and bankruptcy systems; achieve greater consistency, especially for external users; collect more case-related statistics; and share data with other Judiciary systems.

The initial schedule calls for the first NextGen release to be available to the courts in March 2014, followed by full transition over several years to the complete NextGen product.

Judiciary Integrated Financial Management System (JIFMS) to Replace Legacy System

In FY 2012, the technical architecture was completed to support JIFMS. When fully deployed, JIFMS will replace the current AO and court legacy Financial Accounting System for Tomorrow (FAS4T), integrating most of the Judiciary's financial, budget, procurement, and accounting functions. The near-term goal is to streamline financial operations, eliminate costly interfaces, improve data security and controls, and take advantage of today’s best technologies and practices, such as using electronic funds transfers rather than paper checks for payments. JIFMS is scheduled for initial testing and deployment to the AO, the Court of International Trade, Court of Federal Claims, and Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit as beta sites beginning in June 2013. It will then be deployed to other court units and federal defender offices over the next several years.

Judiciary Electronic Travel System (JETS) to Improve Financial Practices

When fully deployed, JETS will be the first nationally supported Judiciary-wide travel system. The near-term goal of the JETS project is to improve travel practices for obligating and reimbursing travel expenses, enhance financial controls, provide centralized travel management reporting capabilities, and allow Judiciary travelers to receive reimbursement for travel expenses via electronic funds transfer. JETS will offer travelers the ability to make travel reservations in the travel expense system which will then create a travel obligation using the traveler’s reservation information. JETS is also mobile-device friendly, offering the option of creating and submitting a travel expense reimbursement voucher from a traveler’s iPhone, Android, or Blackberry mobile device. JETS is scheduled for initial testing and deployment at the AO during the summer of 2013. A successful assessment of the system by the AO will be followed by court implementation.

Financial Managers Trained in E-Learning Programs

The AO continues to make significant progress in developing new e-learning programs for financial management staff. Programs completed or near completion for release in fiscal year 2013 include Appropriations Law for Certifying Officers, managing the court budget, and how to use the Internal Control Evaluation (ICE) tool. New projects include redesigning the Judiciary Basic Procurement program and developing web-based training resources to support the implementation of JIFMS.

Court Registry Investment System (CRIS) Expands

Since the AO assumed this program from the Southern District of Texas in 2011, 23 additional courts have joined, bringing the total to 57 participating courts. Through CRIS, the AO manages more than $2.5 billion in registry funds in over 2,100 court cases. The funds are invested in Treasury’s Government Account Series securities with the Bureau of Public Debt. A working group of court financial managers and the AO are developing the next generation CRIS, a secure online system that will allow for daily liquidity, enhanced online reporting and additional self-service features for the court users. Enhancements to the system are expected in the summer of 2013.

Electronic Noticing Pilot Saves Time, Eases Ticketing for Central Violations Bureau (CVB)

A new electronic process is projected to lower significantly the cost of processing violation notices for petty offenses on federal property. As part of a pilot program, the U.S. Forest Service and law enforcement agencies at Fort Hood, Texas, and the Joint Base Lewis-McChord in Washington, are using portable devices to capture personal information from the magnetic stripe on a driver's license. The officer simply selects the appropriate charges, and the defendant signs a digital pad, eliminating the need for the officer to hand write the ticket. The device then prints a copy of the violation notice, which the officer can hand to the defendant. The data and a copy of the violation notice are electronically transferred to the national Central Violations Bureau (CVB), which processes around 350,000 tickets per year. Law enforcement agencies are starting to recognize the benefits of electronic noticing over handwritten tickets. Processing tickets electronically reduces the time it takes for it to reach CVB, ensures more accurate results, and lowers the processing costs by eliminating manual steps.

Given the pilot’s initial success, the CVB is now working with the Department of Defense (DoD) to approve full implementation of electronic ticketing, which would make the hardware and software readily available to large military installations. DoD issues about half of all violation notices processed by the CVB.

NewSTATS Implementation Continues

The New Streamline Timely Access to Statistics (NewSTATS) project is a multi-year effort to replace the Judiciary's aging legacy statistical system with a robust data warehouse using modern business intelligence tools to collect, process, analyze, and report court caseload data. NewSTATS also allows statistical information to be presented more easily in a variety of graphical images, from maps to graphs.

Work to transfer MJSTAR (the magistrate judge statistics program) to NewSTATS was completed in 2012, and the criminal data from the district courts was transferred into NewSTATS. This made NewSTATS the system of record for the criminal, Civil Justice Reform Act, and civil case data from the district courts, as well as the bankruptcy case and adversary proceedings data from the bankruptcy courts.

Statistical Reports Delivered

In addition to an Annual Report on the activities of the AO and the state of the business of the courts, the AO is statutorily required to submit a number of additional statistical reports to Congress.

Among those delivered in fiscal year 2012 were:

• a report required by the USA PATRIOT Improvement and Reauthorization Act of 2005 on actions taken by judges on requests for delayed-notice search warrants;
• a report required by the Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act of 1968 on the number and nature of federal and state applications for orders authorizing wiretaps;
• a report on the number of times that a crime victims’ right established under 18 U.S.C. § 3771 is asserted in a criminal case in the district courts and information on the relief requested;
• an annual compilation required under the Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act of 2005 (BAPCPA), of case statistics and financial data on debtors who are individuals with primarily consumer debts seeking relief under chapters 7, 11, and 13; and
• semiannual reports under the Civil Justice Reform Act of 1990 (CJRA), 28 U.S.C. § 159, showing by individual U.S. district judge and magistrate judge, all motions pending more than six months, all bench trials that have remained undecided more than six months, and all civil cases pending more than three years. These reports are publicly available.