How could I have missed this? As a follow-up to prior thoughts on implementing e-filing in the courts, I hear great news from Jim McMillan: the Court Technology Laboratory of the National Center for State Courts has developed inCounter, an "Open Source Electronic Filing Demonstration Project." From the site:

Specifically, the inCounter Electronic Filing Manager project is an effort to build the core functionality of an electronic filing inbox that has the following initial goals:

• Demonstrate electronic court document filing.
• Demonstrate a simple to use system (limited initial scope).
• Create an expandable and customizable system through use of open source code.
• Demonstrate support for CourtXML/OASIS LegalXML filing standards.
• Demonstrate support of the W3C SOAP XML communications standard (to connect commercial and advanced systems).
• Demonstrate the use of free Linux, Apache, Perl, and MySQL software in a court application.

The middleware uses SOAP, has a whitepaper [pdf], downloadable source code, documentation, and an interesting FAQ page. Excerpt: "we believe that SOAP is a very important technology direction and hope to work with advanced systems to prove the concept for court electronic filing systems ." There's an explanation of SOAP in the court filing context, as well as a SOAP demo. The project was funded by a grant from the State Justice Institute

My favorite part? It's all free, and ready for tinkering right now. More to come on this later.

  1:31:55 PM