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Electronic Court Filing 3

Electronic Court Filing 3. Technical Overview. DRAFT December 21, 2007. Where it all began. LegalXML.org Community – 1998 Legal, court, business, academic, and technology professionals Collaboration on nonproprietary standards for the legal community LegalXML Inc. – December 2000

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Electronic Court Filing 3

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  1. Electronic Court Filing 3 Technical Overview DRAFT December 21, 2007

  2. Where it all began • LegalXML.org Community – 1998 • Legal, court, business, academic, and technology professionals • Collaboration on nonproprietary standards for the legal community • LegalXML Inc. – December 2000 • Nonprofit corporation ECF 3 Technical Overview

  3. OASIS LegalXML Member Section • LegalXML joined the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Systems (OASIS) – March 2002 • Advantages: • Funding, infrastructure, organization • Part of a recognized standards body • Proven open technical process • Broader community – ebXML, WS-Security, SAML, UBL, … • Active Technical Committees – TC’s: • Electronic Court Filing (ECF) • eNotary ECF 3 Technical Overview

  4. What does the ECF TC do? • The LegalXML Member Section develops specifications for the use of XML to create and transmit legal documents • The ECF TC develops specifications for other functions essential to the e-filing process: • Querying a court for data or documents • Expressing unique court policies and requirements • Providing legally sufficient service of court filings • Linking electronic documents to case management systems • Linking to document management systems • Handling payments associated with electronic filings • Security to ensure confidentiality, authenticity, correctness, and completeness of information transmitted ECF 3 Technical Overview

  5. What happened to 1.0 and 2.0? • Previous specifications: • LegalXML 1.0 (2000) • LegalXML 1.1 (2001) • Court Document 1.1 (2002) • Query and Response (2002) • All approved by industry organizations and in use today by courts and vendors • The latest release of the ECF standard is 3.x, rather than 2.0, to reflect association with GJXDM 3.x Justice XML 1.0/2.0 GJXDM 3.0.x ECF 1.x ECF 3.x ECF 3 Technical Overview

  6. What’s new in ECF 3? • Addresses new requirements based on experience with LegalXML 1.x • Supports NCSC’s Standards for Electronic Filing Processes (Technical and Business Approaches) approved in 2003 • Electronic service (secondary service on parties already associated with the case, not primary service on new parties) • Access to court documents and data • Elements needed to initiate new case filings for all case types • Payments of fees and other court obligations • Electronic court policy • Advanced features of document and message authentication, integrity, and security ECF 3 Technical Overview

  7. Technology changes in ECF 3 • Uses XML schema rather than DTD • Leverages new and emerging standards: • Vocabularies: • GJXDM • UBL • Web services • W3C • OASIS • WS-I ECF 3 Technical Overview

  8. How does ECF 3 relate to the GJXDM and NIEM? • Global Justice XML Data Model (GJXDM) conformance was a core objective of ECF 3 • ECF 3 uses GJXDM version 3.0.3 where the structures and definitions correspond to the requirements of ECF 3 • Newer versions of ECF will conform with the National Information Exchange Model(NIEM) GJXDM ECF 3 Technical Overview

  9. Document Incident Location Metadata Organization Person Activity Arrest Case Citation Contact Info Court GJXDM core components used by ECF 3 messages • Property • Subject • Supervision • Vehicle • Warrant GJXDM Core Components ECF 3 Technical Overview

  10. Interoperability • A primary objective of the ECF architecture is to support interoperability among: • Court case management systems • Court document management systems • Court hosted e-filing systems • Vendor hosted e-filing systems • Law firm case management systems • Any combination of the above ECF 3 Technical Overview

  11. Architecture Strategies • Separate architectural components • Core (messages) • Service interaction profiles • Document signature profiles • Policies (human and machine) • Multiple technical solutions • Service interaction profiles (two so far) • Document signature profiles (five so far) ECF 3 Technical Overview

  12. Architectural Components • Core specification • Defines Major Design Elements (MDE’s) and the operations and messages that are exchanged between them • Service interaction profiles • Describes transmission system infrastructures that deliver messages between MDE’s • Document signature profiles • Describes mechanisms for signing electronic documents • Court Policy • Documents in both human readable and machine readable form policies, procedures, and codes required to support e-filing functions in a given court ECF 3 Technical Overview

  13. Major Design Elements (MDE’s) • ECF divides the electronic filing process into four MDE’s and describes the messages passed between them Service MDE Filing Assembly MDE Filing Review MDE Court Record MDE ECF 3 Technical Overview

  14. Service MDE • Enables a party to receive service electronically from other parties in a case (secondary service only) Service MDE Filing Assembly MDE Filing Review MDE Court Record MDE ECF 3 Technical Overview

  15. Filing Assembly MDE • Enables a filer to submit a filing and receive a response from the court • Supports service on other parties in the case Service MDE Filing Assembly MDE Filing Review MDE Court Record MDE ECF 3 Technical Overview

  16. Filing Review MDE • Enables a court to receive and review a filing message and respond to filers • Prepares filings for recording in the court CMS and DMS • Enables filers to obtain court policies and status of filings Service MDE Filing Assembly MDE Filing Review MDE Court Record MDE ECF 3 Technical Overview

  17. Court Record MDE • Enables a court to store electronic documents • Enables a court to post docket entries and other updates to its CMS and DMS applications • Enables filers to obtain service information, case information, and documents Service MDE Filing Assembly MDE Filing Review MDE Court Record MDE ECF 3 Technical Overview

  18. Sample Configuration #1Court Hosted • All MDE’s are implemented at the court ECF 3 Technical Overview

  19. Sample Configuration #2Third Party Filing Assembly MDE ECF 3 Technical Overview 19

  20. Sample Configuration #3Multiple Filing Assembly MDE’s ECF 3 Technical Overview 20

  21. Sample Configuration #4Law Firm as Filing Assembly MDE ECF 3 Technical Overview 21

  22. Sample Configuration #5Portal with split Filing Review MDE Functions ECF 3 Technical Overview 22

  23. Sample Configuration #6Portal with 3rd Party Filing Review MDE’s ECF 3 Technical Overview 23

  24. Core Message Case-Type-Specific Message Court-Specific Message Attachment Attachment ECF 3.x Message Stream Messages • A message stream contains: • A required core message • Basic information common to all courts and case types • An optional case-type-specific message • Information appropriate only for a particular type of filing • An optional court-specific message • Information appropriate only for cases in a particular court ECF 3 Technical Overview

  25. More on messages… • A message is an XML document transmitted between MDE’s that validates against a message schema • All messages are asynchronous • Supports SOA principle of stateless design • A message may include binary-encoded documents • Embedded in the message using the GJXDM <j:DocumentBinaryData> element, or • Included in one or more MIME attachments to the message stream ECF 3 Technical Overview

  26. Operations • ECF operations are defined in the core specification, including: • Operations supported by each MDE • The normal sequence of operations • Business rules for each operation ECF 3 Technical Overview

  27. Note: Operations shown in bold text are required ECF 3 Technical Overview

  28. Additional Operations • Other query operations • GetFilingList • GetFilingStatus • GetCaseList • GetCase • GetDocument ECF 3 Technical Overview

  29. Service Interaction Profiles • Service interaction profiles support interoperability and reusability • The core specification defines a comprehensive list of nonfunctional requirements for service interaction profiles and document signature profiles • Each profile defines exactly how it meets and implements each nonfunctional requirement ECF 3 Technical Overview

  30. Service Interaction Profiles (continued) • Each service interaction profile must support: • Transport Protocol • MDE addressing • Operation addressing • Request and operation invocation • Synchronous mode response • Asynchronous mode response • Message/attachment delimiters • Message identifiers • Each service interaction profile should support: • Message non-repudiation • Message integrity • Message confidentiality • Message authentication • Message reliability • Transmission auditing ECF 3 Technical Overview

  31. Service Interaction Profiles (continued) • Current service interaction profiles • Web services (based on WS-I Basic Profile) • Portable media (sneakernet) • Potential future service interaction profiles • Electronic mail (e-mail) • ?? ECF 3 Technical Overview

  32. Document Signature Profiles • Each document signature profile must support: • Signer name assertion • Signed date assertion • Multiple signatures • Each document signature profile should support: • Signer and date non-repudiation • Document integrity • Document signature auditing ECF 3 Technical Overview

  33. Document Signature Profiles (continued) • Currently defined document signature profiles • Null • XML Signature • Application-specific • Proxy and Symmetric Key • Potential future document signature profiles • Password • Password/PIN ECF 3 Technical Overview

  34. Court Policies • Court policies support customizations and local practices through: • Human-readable court policy • May be HTML, text, or other document format • Court’s rules and requirements for electronic filing • Machine-readable court policy • Must be XML (an ECF 3 message) • ECF 3 options supported in the implementation • Court code lists and extensions • Design-time and run-time information • Courts should start with small core set of information and expand as semantics can support ECF 3 Technical Overview

  35. Lessons Learned • Separate functional and nonfunctional designs • Messages vs. service interaction profiles • Standardized services – not applications • Leverage standards (e.g., GJXDM, UBL) for content • Enclose documents with messages using MIME or DIME attachments rather than embedding • Use the GJXDM extensions mechanism where possible, but multiple layers of extensions complicate interoperability • Where appropriate, describe and enforce customizations in schema • Document remaining customizations separately ECF 3 Technical Overview

  36. Questions? Getting the standard: http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/tc_home.php?wg_abbrev=legalxml-courtfiling Contacting the Committee: Ron Bowmaster, Public Sector Co-Chair tclarke@ncsc.dni.us John Greacen, Private Sector Co-Chair john@greacen.net Thanks to the many contributors to the ECF standard! ECF 3 Technical Overview

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