Electronic filing standards activity is chugging right along. The newly-formed OASIS LegalXML Court Filing Technical Committee has its first face-to-face meeting later this week in Salt Lake City. Several items are on the agenda, including review of the CourtFiling 1.1 specification; the Court Document 1.1 Draft Standard; a Query and Response Draft Standard; and the Draft Court Policy Interface Requirements, as well as updates on a variety of additional issues.

In an encouraging SOAP development, one company announced today an "open source" bundle of software designed to handle the collection and management of LegalXML filings. The company, counterclaim, states that "The user interface is built around servlet/JSP technology and implemented using the Jetty JSP engine and using Apache's Struts and Tiles UI architecture. Filings can be accepted via HTTPS or SOAP over HTTPS." The company plans to maintain an open development list.

In the past month I've spent a lot of time updating the weblog pages I maintain for the WV Supreme Court, which contain summaries of opinions and other case developments.  I'm pleased to report that this quiet court weblog experiment has been a big success thus far; the weblog directory shot to the top three most visited in our site, and visitors don't just click-through. The average visit length is 5 times that of other similar pages in the site, which to me means that people are actually reading the posts. Lawyers and members of the press have commented favorably.  I hear snippets of my summaries parroted and paraphrased in news stories from time to time.  Last week, in a videoconference about law office management broadcast to 30 WV counties, I spoke briefly about this technology.  During my presentation, 12 visiting judges from Russia were in the courtroom.  Now if only more courts would create official court information feeds . . .

One unfortunate consequence of all this activity is that I've had very little time to update the non-local side of my weblog.  (i.e. the pages hosted on Userland's servers; I maintain four pages on our public court site and two intranet pages using Radio.) There are days when all I can do is manage to scroll through my aggregator.  I'm very pleased to see the new lawyers, librarians and law clerks among us, and look forward to continued growth in this part of the blogoshpere.  Having such good minds out there freely sharing their perspective on complex issues is extremely beneficial.