Trends In State Courts is both an annual publication and a website with a “Monthly Trends” feature.

This month, the featured trend was Managing High-Profile Cases, which has been a focus of collaborative grant work between SJI and several key partners, including the National Center for State Courts, Conference of Court Public Information Officers, and the National Judicial College.

A high-profile case is defined in the piece as, “a case that attracts enough media or public attention that the court must or should make significant alterations to ordinary court procedures to manage it.”   This could be because of attachment to a particular issue at the forefront of society, involvement of a celebrity, or some other element of the case that captures the media’s attention.

In the feature, the Managing High-Profile Cases in the 21st Century website is cited as the primary reference tool for all existing work related to these cases, which includes definitions and examples, continuity of operations planning, updated content from Managing Notorious Trials, originally published in 1992 (updated in 1998), media relations, and critical constitutional case law, among other resources.