Court Operations – Annual Report 2024

Modernizing and Safeguarding Electronic Case Management

The Judiciary made significant progress in 2024 on a multi-year modernization of its electronic case management system, a major project expected to improve the Judiciary’s cybersecurity posture and benefit litigants and the public who need access to court records.

The Case Management Modernization project aims to replace the Judiciary’s aging Case Management/Electronic Case Filing (CM/ECF) system with a modern, sustainable, and secure platform for the Judiciary to manage cases and provide public access to case documents. It has been underway since early 2022.

In 2024, the project fully transitioned from planning phases to the proof of concept phase, which is a development phase that will produce working software that includes some of the key features required for a case management system. It is a way to test and validate proposed solutions before development of a fully functional product and before any commitment is made to a particular process or technology.

The new case management system is being developed with input from the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts (AO) staff and user representatives from federal courts throughout the country. To put the needs and experiences of court users at the center of the product development process, a group of 70 user representatives was recruited from the courts. The group included judges, clerks of court, chambers staff, and operational and IT personnel, who provided input on workflows, such as case openings, docketing, and adjudication phases.

Intensive efforts in 2024 also focused on replacing the current version of the search functionality for public users of the Public Access to Court Electronic Records (PACER) service. The PACER replacement will provide unified search functionality, aimed at making records searches easier, more intuitive, and user friendly.

Input on new features for the replacement was provided by the Judiciary’s Public User Group, a group of 12 people who represent a cross section of PACER users. They include representatives of the legal sector, commercial enterprises, the media, academia, government agencies, and the public.

When the system is up and running, it will be possible to search for records across federal court boundaries nationally in near real time. The unified search functionality will eliminate the need for users to search for records at individual courts. It will also enable full-text searches and searches by judges’ names and incorporate “fuzzy” search logic so that misspellings and similar words are discovered — features that PACER users have consistently requested.

Random Case Assignment

At its March 2024 session, the Judicial Conference of the United States approved a policy regarding case assignment practices. The policy said that district courts should apply district-wide assignment to:

• civil actions seeking to bar or mandate statewide enforcement of a state law, including a rule, regulation, policy, or order of the executive branch or a state agency, whether by declaratory judgment and/or any form of injunctive relief; and
• civil actions seeking to bar or mandate nationwide enforcement of a federal law, including a rule, regulation, policy, or order of the executive branch or a federal agency, whether by declaratory judgment and/or any form of injunctive relief. 

The policy applies when the remedy sought has implications beyond the parties before the court and the local community, and the importance of having a case heard by a judge with ties to the local community is not a compelling factor. It also assists courts in limiting the ability of litigants to choose judges effectively in certain cases based on where they file lawsuits.

“Since 1995, the Judicial Conference has strongly supported the random assignment of cases and the notion that all district judges remain generalists,” said Judge Robert J. Conrad Jr., secretary of the Conference and Director of the AO. “The random case-assignment policy deters judge-shopping and the assignment of cases based on the perceived merits or abilities of a particular judge. It promotes the impartiality of proceedings and bolsters public confidence in the federal Judiciary.”

In the nation’s 94 federal district courts, local case assignment plans facilitate the random selection of judges. Some plans assign cases to a judge in the division of the court where the case is filed. In divisions where only a single judge sits, these rules have made it possible for a litigant to preselect that judge by filing in that division.

In his 2021 Year-End Report on the Federal Judiciary, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. wrote, “Senators from both sides of the aisle have expressed concern that case assignment procedures … might, in effect, enable the plaintiff to select a particular judge to hear a case.”

Public debate grew when several highly controversial lawsuits, seeking nationwide injunctions against federal government policies, were filed in single-judge court divisions.

Sharing Court Reporter Resources

The Judiciary has launched an initiative to support court reporting services in federal courts through sharing court reporters in person or virtually. On-staff court reporters either travel to other courts from their home courts to provide on-site services, or they take the verbatim record remotely for proceedings in another court using audiovisual technology.

The initiative was first piloted in six volunteer courts with a newly developed scheduling platform, created through a collaborative effort among the AO, court leaders and their staffs, and several federal court reporters. The pilot was then expanded to 21 district courts with plans for continued incremental expansion to all district courts.

The project has several advantages. Remote reporting makes it easier to provide services in areas where reporters are scarce, decreases costs by reducing travel expenses and overhead, and allows for greater flexibility in scheduling reporters to make sure courts have the resources they need.

Helping to Improve Background Checks

In 2024, the Judiciary began a national rollout of a data feed to all courts nationwide, in compliance with a federal law that seeks to improve the data available during background checks for the purchase or possession of firearms.

The data feed automates the transmission of criminal case documents and data from the Judiciary’s case management systems to the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS). The nationwide expansion of the data feed was approved by the Judicial Conference after a successful pilot involving eight district courts. The AO is overseeing the rollout.

In addition to ensuring compliance with the Fix NICS Act of 2018, the data feed is expected to improve operational efficiencies in clerks of court offices. The bill amended the Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act to require federal agencies and federal courts to certify whether they have provided to NICS any disqualifying records of individuals prohibited from receiving or possessing a firearm.

Data Center Move

In August 2024, the AO successfully completed a relocation of a major data center. The Judiciary’s West Coast data center had been located in San Diego, CA, but was moved to El Segundo, CA, after the vendor’s contract with the San Diego building was terminated by the building’s owner. The move took several months to complete. Multiple contingency plans were adopted during that time to ensure that the Judiciary’s IT systems continued to operate without interruption. The move was completed on time and within the allocated budget.

Access to Interpreters

Spanish is the most frequently used language in interpreting proceedings in the federal courts, comprising 94 percent of all reported interpreting events in fiscal year 2024. Courts used interpreters in 196,155 court proceedings in the 12 months ending September 30, 2024. Overall, 130 languages were used, and American Sign Language was used in 257 cases. The top 10 spoken languages that required interpreting are listed in the following chart.