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> (as a lawyer and software developer) Me too. >What I've proposed in the past is a "Wordpress for courts" - a free, open source case management system. It wi

by nkw 11y ago

> (as a lawyer and software developer) Me too. >What I've proposed in the past is a "Wordpress for courts" - a free, open source case management system. It will be more quickly adopted by smaller courts with limited budgets. As larger court systems take notice, they will be attracted not just to the cost and better UX, but the extensibility. The country will benefit by having better, faster access to court records, case law, etc. This. So much this. Courts are either buying commercial systems which are incredibly expensive and suck, or building their own which turns into a huge political football and results in a product that is ... what you expect. Someone (perhaps a 501c3 or something similar) needs to build a best in class open source court/case management system. Similar to what the 18F people are doing at the federal executive branch. There is still plenty of money for contractors/companies to make implementing and maintaining the solution for the individual courts, but every court in the country from the U.S. Court of Appeals to Mayberry Municipal Court running (or developing!) a different management system is insane. Imagine if all the Courts had a common API to accept your filings or notify you of case activities?

jedgardyson 11y ago
Thank you for your comment. It is spot on. Like I alluded to in the comment above, this was the problem that originally captivated me about the space. I was retrieving some documents from court and had to go there in person once, and then 3mo later, to get the job done. Started reading about standards, court data practices in all 50 states and was appaled by the absence of good tools and open standards to solve exactly the problem you mentioned. I've wanted to be a public interest lawyer my whole life, but when I saw how terrible the tooling/public data infrastructure for it was I thought that if I could take a crack at solving this problem it would, for me, be a more meaningful contribution towards helping to improve the lives of the people those attorneys serve.

by nkw 11y ago

jedgardyson 11y ago

Thank you for your comment. It is spot on. Like I alluded to in the comment above, this was the problem that originally captivated me about the space. I was retrieving some documents from court and had to go there in person once, and then 3mo later, to get the job done. Started reading about standards, court data practices in all 50 states and was appaled by the absence of good tools and open standards to solve exactly the problem you mentioned. I've wanted to be a public interest lawyer my whole life, but when I saw how terrible the tooling/public data infrastructure for it was I thought that if I could take a crack at solving this problem it would, for me, be a more meaningful contribution towards helping to improve the lives of the people those attorneys serve.