[Openefm-development] Specifications: Legal XML Update

[Jim B. <be...@co...>]

Howdy,

	I just got done participating in the phone call in portion of the 
Legal XML Electronic Court Filing Technical Committee face-to-face 
meeting.  The current meeting is happening in Salt Lake City.  They are 
solidifying use cases for the Court Filing Blue.  I found two items 
discussed to be noteworthy.
	First, they decided that filing fees will only be able to be obtained 
by a court CMS.  Therefore a filing application will have to query a 
court with the filing information and get the fee information back in 
the response.  2GEFS covers this info in the Court Policy files, but 
Legal XML does not like that solution.  They spoke a fair amount about 
the filing fee being the responsibility of the filing party, which I'm 
not sure I agree with.  There was mention of filing parties being 
responsible for filling in a filing fee field in a filing interface.  I 
think the Legal XML solution will require greater work to implement, 
and the thought of a filing party being able to arbitrarily state their 
assessed fee seemed troublesome.
	Second, they mentioned being able to submit filings without a 
document.  The purpose of this would be to allow fees to be payed 
through a filing interface.  I like this concept.  It would allow fines 
assessed by the court to be collected in the same way a filing is.  
Technically there isn't much of a difference in the process ( same data 
set, etc.. ) but the verbiage and interface might have to change a bit 
to accommodate it.

Jim Beard
counterclaim.com, Inc
http://www.counterclaim.com
http://openefm.sourceforge.net
(800) 264-8145