Long Range Plan for Information Technology in the Federal Judiciary FY 2009

External Participants

Objectives
External Participants Success Stories

Technology has increased accessibility to the courts, and the appetite for electronic information and interaction between external participants and the judiciary is growing. The courts serve the public, and as such, recognize that the public should share in the benefits of the judiciary’s investment in information technology, including access to case-related information. The courts provide electronic information to the public in a variety of ways. For example, courts maintain internet websites with court-specific information and rules, and the electronic public access program provides access to case-related information. The courts are equally aware that certain types of cases, categories of information, and specific documents may require special protection from unlimited public access. In addition to the public, Congress, executive branch agencies, state and local courts, law enforcement agencies, the bar, litigants, creditors, debtors, and law schools all depend on information maintained by the courts. In the probation and pretrial services area, many external organizations—local, state, and federal law enforcement agencies, the United States Sentencing Commission, and the Bureau of Prisons—exchange information with probation and pretrial services offices.

Objectives

• Provide the public and the bar with easy access to appropriate court and case information.
• Provide external participants, including pro se parties where appropriate, with access to the adjudicative process.
• Explore means of accessing and combining information to eliminate duplicate entry of data.
• Establish interfaces that enable probation and pretrial service officers to exchange information more easily with external participants, such as the Bureau of Prisons and law enforcement entities.
• Supply a means to provide and preserve long-term public access to the judiciary’s electronic records in closed cases.

External Participants Success Stories

Electronic Public Access Program
The Electronic Public Access Program gives the public electronic access to court information at a reasonable cost. Previously, a member of the public who wanted case information was required to visit the court in person, where a clerk would locate and retrieve the paper file and the documents of interest would be photocopied for a fee. Now, through services provided by the Electronic Public Access Program, a user can obtain case information anywhere there is an internet connection or simply a telephone. The program, with more than 500,000 registered users, has made the courts far more accessible to the public and proven popular with the bar. The judiciary has taken significant steps to ensure that fees are fair and reasonable, and it has developed free access options such as public terminals in the courthouse as well as the Voice Case Information Systems for bankruptcy.

Internet and Public Access Network
All court sites make information available to the public via the internet at no cost. Court staff have developed local internet home pages that are hosted on web servers on the public access network. Information available includes local rules, forms, filing information, and general information that pertains to the court. In addition, more than 80 national forms have been automated and placed on the judiciary’s internet site, making them available to attorneys and other non-judiciary users who previously had to obtain them from their local district courts.

Telephone Access to Case Information
VCIS (Voice Case Information System) uses an automated voice response system to provide a limited amount of bankruptcy case information directly from the court’s database in response to touch-tone telephone inquiries. Access to VCIS is offered at no cost.

U.S. Party/Case Index
Electronic public access services have rapidly expanded throughout the federal judiciary in the past few years. The public demand for these services has increased, both in terms of the number of registrants and the amount of actual usage. Several hundred registrants regularly review large numbers of cases in many jurisdictions. Some of these registrants, in particular organizations tracking regional or national bankruptcy, civil, or criminal litigation have requested more efficient methods to retrieve case information from multiple court jurisdictions. In response to this need, the judiciary has created the U.S. Party/Case Index. The U.S. Party/Case Index is a national locator index for Public Access to Court Electronic Records (PACER) systems in the appellate, district, and bankruptcy courts. Subsets of data are collected from each court and transferred to the PACER Service Center nightly. The U.S. Party/Case Index allows searches by party name or Social Security Number in the bankruptcy index, party name or nature of suit in the civil index, defendant name in the criminal index, and party name in the appellate index. The information provided by the search includes the party name, the court where the case is filed, the case number, and the filing date as well as a hyperlink to the docket sheet and documents in the court in which the case resides.