Category: News And Announcements

The SJI Board of Directors met at the Supreme Court of Connecticut on June 24, 2013, to consider grant applications for the 3rd quarter of FY 2013. A total of 13 grants were awarded during this meeting. One Project Grant was awarded to the Supreme Court of Ohio to for a statewide initiative that will provide a forum for domestic relations judges and their justice system partners to assess protocols, examine resources, and share promising practices.

A total of nine (9) Technical Assistance (TA) Grants were awarded, including grants to: the National Center for State Courts (NCSC) to test and evaluate approaches used in three states to adjudicate domestic relations cases in order to develop a triage system for these case types; the Missouri Office of the State Courts Administrator for a forms and self-represented litigant website six-language translation project; Okanogan County, Washington, to assess the performance of the Office of the Clerk; the National Association of Women Judges (NAWJ) to develop a training program for judicial officers on human trafficking and increase outreach on this critical topic area; the Henderson Municipal Court in Nevada to conduct an operational review and recommend best practices to improve court administration; the Eugene Municipal Court in Oregon to assess caseflow management; the Oregon Judicial Department for a pilot project designed to improve language access in Oregon’s courts; the Idaho Supreme Court and Judicial Council for a statewide judicial performance evaluation; and, the Administrative Office of the Illinois Courts to develop and implement a statewide caseload data evaluation for adult and juvenile probation and pretrial services caseloads.

Three (3) Curriculum Adaptation & Training (CAT) Grants were also awarded including grants to: the National Judicial College (NJC) to develop an advanced skills curriculum for state appellate judges; the Connecticut Judicial Branch to implement a training program for court staff and judges that better identifies and serves individuals with hidden disabilities; and, the Superior Court of Fresno County, California, to deliver a situational leadership training program to 50 current and future court leaders.

The deadline for FY 2013 4th quarter grant applications is Thursday, August 1, 2013. Consultation with SJI staff prior to, and during the preparation of, grant applications is strongly encouraged.

In FY 2012, SJI awarded 6 Strategic Initiatives Grants (SIGs) totaling $275,158 addressing one of SJI’s Priority Investment Areas: Self-Represented Litigation and the State Courts. SIG grants were made to the: 1) Judicial Council of California to train bilingual JusticeCorps volunteers to provide enhanced services for self-represented litigants (SRLs); 2)Indiana Administrative Office of the Courts to train volunteer college and law students to serve statewide pro se clinic clients; 3) the National Center for State Courts (NCSC) to develop a standard set of definitions and counting rules for cases involving one or more SRLs; 4) the Self-Represented Litigation Network (SRLN) and the NCSC to develop formal case triage protocols for assistance to SRLs; 5) the SRLN to facilitate state court reimbursement under Title IV-D, and promote awareness of this resource; and 6) the South Carolina Access to Justice Commission for delivery of legal information to SRLs in underserved areas of South Carolina.

The Judicial Council of California, Administrative Office of the Courts (AOC) has, through its Court Interpreter Program, made significant strides towards developing and implementing a statewide training program that will allow 40 bilingual Justice Corps members to learn how to direct SRLs to self-help resources . In addition to an in-person training curriculum being finalized, the AOC will deploy an online training module this month.

The NCSC and SRLN continue to assist the state courts in updating court websites and downloadable materials that can be easily accessed by SRLs. The NCSC is also developing a set of standardized definitions and counting rules for pro se cases. This report and accompanying resources is expected to be available in early January 2014.

SJI will continue to provide updates on these projects.

The Board met on April 8, 2013, to make decisions on FY 2013, 2nd quarter grant applications. A total of 14 grants were awarded during this meeting. One Project Grant was awarded to the National Center for State Courts (NCSC) to develop and pilot specialized jury instructions on implicit bias. Led by the NCSC and Project Implicit, this grant will support the drafting of model jury instructions on implicit bias, pilot their effectiveness using a mock jury, and disseminate the research findings to state court judges.

A total of eight (8) Technical Assistance (TA) Grants were approved, including grants to: Volusia County, Florida, Clerk of the Circuit Court to conduct an e-courtroom assessment and redesign in preparation for statewide e-filing; Massachusetts Trial Court Administrative Office of the Court (AOC) to further statewide language access improvement efforts by developing a model courthouse; New Mexico AOC to continue ensuring language access in the courts by continued delivery of training to judicial employees; 20th Circuit Court of Ottawa County, Michigan, to develop statewide juvenile justice system data sharing capabilities; Superior Court of the Virgin Islands to conduct strategic planning using the High Performance Court (HPC) Framework; 9th Judicial Circuit Court of Orange County, Florida, to ensure court compliance with Florida law regarding guardians and their LEP wards; and two grants to the NCSC for development of a model virtual courthouse setting with integrated technology, as well as the creation of resource for state courts on responding to courthouse security incidents.

Five (5) Curriculum Adaptation & Training (CAT) Grants were also approved, including grants to: Legal Momentum to enhance their online Intimate Partner Sexual Abuse course; County of York in Pennsylvania to develop a model guardianship training and community education program; Nebraska Judicial Branch Education Division of the AOC for the design and delivery of continuing education to Guardian Ad Litems; Superior Court of the Virgin Islands for judicial training, inclusive of the NCSC’s CourtTools curriculum; and, the National Consortium on Racial and Ethnic Fairness in the Courts (NCREFC), which will develop training on objective (race-neutral) decision-making processes for judicial officers and administrators.

SJI also welcomed National Association for Court Management (NACM) President Pam Harris and President-Elect David Slayton to the meeting. Ms. Harris and Mr. Slayton delivered a briefing on the status of SJI-funded NACM projects, and discussed the upcoming NACM Annual Conference, July 14-18, 2013 in San Antonio, Texas.

Chief Judge Jonathan Lippman of the State of New York and the New York Court of Appeals was officially sworn in by SJI Board Chairman Chief Justice Jim Hannah as a member of the Board of Directors on Sunday, April 7, 2013. Chief Judge Lippman joins ten other Board members appointed by the President and confirmed by the Senate. By law, the President must appoint six state court judges, one state court administrator, and four members of the public (no more than two of whom may be of the same political party). Chief Judge Lippman has held his current position since 2009. He has spent his entire legal career in the New York state court system, serving for 40 years in a variety of roles, including Chief Administrative Judge of all New York State Courts from 1996 to 2007.

SJI began using the Strategic Initiatives Grants (SIG) program in FY 2008 to address immigration issues in the state courts at a national impact level. The Center for Public Policy Studies (CPPS) was awarded a SIG (SJI-08-P-138) to identify the major challenges and opportunities for state courts in addressing immigration issues in several pilot states.

Subsequent grant awards expanded the impact of this project to additional states, in addition to generating bench guides and other key materials on this important issue. CPPS (in coordination with SJI) also developed working relationships with key federal agencies, including the Department of Homeland Security/U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), DHS/Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), and DOJ/Executive Office of Immigration Review (EOIR). Over the years, these working relationships have led to a significant increase in understanding of the critical state court role in federal and state immigration law and policy, including a focus on human trafficking and the importance of state court records in immigration proceedings.

The rights of a non-citizen under federal immigration law can be impacted by their involvement in a state court criminal, family, juvenile, or civil case. This can make the application process to the USCIS for naturalization and other immigration benefits heavily dependent on the contents and quality of state court records. Access to court records is also needed by unaccompanied juveniles and immigrant crime victims, and state court records documenting family relationships can be critical to processing immigration matters. However, there are significant misalignments between the USCIS and state court systems that make the system especially difficult for immigrants, state court personnel, and federal immigration hearing officers. Applicants for immigrant benefits must produce certified copies of state court documents regarding cases in which they were involved. In general, USCIS does not allow these documents to be submitted electronically, even if the transmission comes from the state court. Filling these requests can be time consuming for court personnel. Furthermore, contents and quality of court records can vary greatly by state, and even within a state, so that some court actions may not appear in records at all.

With SJI support, in a new project CPPS will address four strategic priorities: 1) enhance state court capacity to efficiently, securely, and effectively exchange records with USCIS; 2) increase the ease of access to state court records by self-represented immigrant court users; 3) build effective partnerships between the state courts and USCIS in two pilot states (Georgia and Iowa); and 4) create a model approach and tools for effective state court/USCIS records exchange that can be used across the United States. CPPS will form and facilitate state court/USCIS records exchange development and implementation teams to assess the uses of state court records, and document best practices. The Georgia and Iowa AOCs, in addition to state court clerks of courts associations and USCIS field offices are committed to this project. The two states illustrate both ends of the court record spectrum – court record-keeping in Georgia is mostly locally controlled and paper-based; whereas Iowa is implementing a centralized electronic and document filing system that will make court records paperless statewide.

The project will result in a model state court/USCIS records exchange planning and technical assistance approach that can be used across the United States; best practices for records exchange and serving immigrants; and records exchange training curricula that has been tested in two states and will be adaptable.

SJI support has enabled the Center for Public Policy Studies/The National Judicial College/Center for Court Innovation (CPPS/NJC/CCI) to recently form a Human Trafficking and the State Courts Collaborative focused on 4 strategic priorities:

• Increasing understanding and awareness about the challenges faced by state courts in dealing with cases involving trafficking victims and their families, and traffickers;
• Developing and testing state and local approaches for assessing and addressing the impact of human trafficking victims and defendants in the state courts;
• Enhancing state and local court capacity to improve court services affected by human trafficking-related cases processing demands; and,
• Building effective national, state, and local partnerships for addressing the impacts of human trafficking case processing in the state courts.

The SJI Board established Human Trafficking and the State Courts as a Priority Investment Area on October 1, 2012.

This month, theNational Association of Women Judges (NAWJ) and Legal Momentum/National Judicial Education Program (NJEP) officially joined the Collaborative. NAWJ has made human trafficking a priority over the past 2 years, and with SJI support, has been able to offer educational programming to their membership on this critical issue. With a recent SJI grant (SJI-13-E-090), NJEP will add a module on human trafficking to it popular course, Intimate Partner Sexual Abuse: Adjudicating This Hidden Dimension of Domestic Violence Cases. This web course has proved to be highly successful, as over 13,000 learners have taken the course. It is available free of charge at www.njep-ipsacourse.org.

SJI appreciates the commitment of NAWJ and Legal Momentum to supporting the state courts on this issue, and commends both organizations for joining the Human Trafficking and the State Courts Collaborative.

On March 20, 2013, the Senate approved the Department of Defense, Military Construction and Veteran Affairs, and Full-Year Continuing Appropriations Act, 2013 (H.R. 933). The bill provided $5,121,000 for SJI – the same level appropriated in FY 2012. On March 21st, the House approved the bill with no changes. SJI is subject to sequestration per the Budget Control Act of 2011 (P.L. 112-25), and rescissions included in the Full-Year Continuing Appropriations Act, 2013, which will result in a reduction of approximately 7 percent ($356,912) in FY 2013.

SJI recently awarded a grant (SJI-13-N-028) to the Maryland Judiciary, Administrative Office of the Courts (AOC), and the Maryland Mediation and Conflict Resolution Office (MACRO) to implement the final phases of their policy and program analysis of Alternative Dispute Resolution (ADR) in the state. The goals of this project are to: 1) conduct a comprehensive cost/benefit analysis of ADR in several Maryland settings, including short and long-term costs to the Judiciary, litigants, and other public agencies; 2) assess the effectiveness of various ADR approaches and an understanding of what approaches are more effective in various settings; and 3) develop an understanding of the role of ADR in promoting access to justice. There is currently a lack of comprehensive state level data on the full costs of ADR, including best practices; therefore, this project will fill a major gap by providing a model for ADR assessment. At the end of this project, there will resources available to all state courts seeking to further examine the effectiveness of their ADR programs.

The SJI Board of Directors will be meeting on Monday, April 8, 2013 at 1:00 PM. The meeting will be held at SJI Headquarters in Reston, Virginia. The purpose of this meeting is to consider grant applications for the 2nd quarter of FY 2013, and other business. All portions of this meeting are open to the public.

In November 2012, the Institute for the Advancement of the American Legal System (IAALS) at the University of Denver released a Rule One Initiative report titled, Measuring Rule 16.1: Colorado’s Simplified Procedure Experiment (SJI-12-N-127). The report is a follow-up to the IAALS 2010 publication of Surveys of the Colorado Bench & Bar on Colorado’s Simplified Pretrial Procedure for Civil Actions, and provides empirical answers to the question: “what has happened with Rule 16.1 in Colorado?”

In 2004, the Colorado Supreme Court issued Rule 16.1, a voluntary pretrial process for smaller dollar-volume civil cases, in an effort to provide timely and efficient resolution of these cases. Rule 16.1 now serves as the default pretrial procedure in Colorado district courts for most civil cases of less than $100,000. Parties may elect to “opt out” and use the standard pretrial process instead of this “simplified” procedure, which replaces discovery with mandated disclosures, along with assurances of a faster route to trial. Recovery under Rule 16.1, including attorney fees but excluding costs, cannot exceed the $100,000 limit.

The latest IAALS report documents the analysis of Rule 16.1, including its role and impact. The value of the project is magnified by the growing interest nationally in streamlining pretrial procedures, case differentiation, and optional processes for both civil and criminal cases, although civil matters have generally been excluded from significant pretrial process improvement.

The IAALS highlighted that the analysis found the highest rate of Rule 16.1 cases occurred in consumer credit collection actions (95 percent) and other straightforward contract actions in which damages are fixed or liquidated. In 70 percent of cases proceeding under Rule 16.1, there is no appearance by any defendant, and more than half resolve by entry of default judgment. Overall, the perception among interviewed attorneys and judges is that the cap on damages and inflexible limits on discovery have discouraged attorneys from using the procedure.

In the 30 percent of Rule 16.1 cases that were contested and therefore invoked the provisions of the procedure, there is mixed evidence on the rule’s impact. Time to disposition and the county in which the case is filed were found to play a larger role than Rule 16.1. In addition, Rule 16.1 cases have not been shown to have a higher trial rate. However, Rule 16.1 is associated with a decrease in the number of motions filed. It is not possible to know whether the results would have been different if the rule was more frequently applied in actively litigated cases.

The report provides interesting insight for state courts who may be considering new methods to ensure the just, speedy, and inexpensive resolution of civil cases. The full report is available through IAALS Rule One Initiative website or the NCSC Library eCollection.