LegalXML Electronic Court Filing Technical Committee

The Electronic Court Filing Technical Committee, within the OASIS LegalXML Member Section, develops specifications for the electronic filing and service of legal documents between litigants and courts.

The Technical Committee develops specifications to create legal documents and to transmit legal documents from an attorney, party or self-represented litigant to a court, from a court to an attorney, party or self-represented litigant or to another court, and from an attorney or other user to another attorney or other user of legal documents. Because it is an essential part of the business model for electronic filing applications, the Technical Committee also develops specifications for

• querying a court for data or documents and for returning the response to such a query,
• expressing unique court policies and requirements,
• providing legally sufficient service of court filings on other attorneys and unrepresented parties to a court case (and, if and when authorized by law, service of process on defendants or respondents to establish the court's jurisdiction over them under principles of due process of law), and
• linking electronic documents to law firm and court case management information and document management systems. It develops additional specifications found to be needed to support the transition of courts and the legal profession from reliance upon paper documents and paper court files to electronic documents and electronic case files.

In addition to the OASIS approval process, the Electronic Court Filing Technical Committee provides its proposed and recommended specifications to the Joint Technology Committee of the Conference of State Court Administrators (COSCA) and National Association for Court Management (NACM). The Joint Technology Committee acts upon the Technical Committee's proposals to adopt a specification as a "proposed standard" for experimental implementation. After a "proposed standard" successfully completes interoperability tests, the Technical Committee transmits the specification to the Joint Technology Committee for adoption as a "recommended standard." When the Joint Technology Committee approves that recommendation, it is sent to the Boards of Directors of the two parent bodies for formal adoption on behalf of all state courts.

The members of the Conference of Chief Justices will then take whatever actions are required to implement the standards in their jurisdictions.

The Electronic Court Filing Technical Committee develops the following deliverables:

• Electronic Court Filing (ECF) Core specifications that define the:
  • Components, or major design elements (MDEs), of an ECF system
  • The content and format (e.g. XML or JSON schemas) of National Information Exchange Model (NIEM) conforming messages that are exchanged between the MDEs
  • Mechanisms for configuring an ECF system to convey local policies, conventions and code lists (e.g. court policy)
  • Mechanisms for extending ECF messages to support additional content
• ECF Service Interaction Profiles (SIPs) that define implementations of an ECF system (e.g. SOAP-based web services)
• ECF Signature Profiles that define the application of electronic/digital signatures, assertions, and integrity protections to electronic documents and content.

The TC operates under the RF on Limited Terms Mode of the OASIS IPR Policy.

• Practitioners in courts and legal services
• Providers of technology solutions to courts and legal services

The TC will conduct its work and publish its specifications in English.