Transcript TxedConf - Eastern District of Texas Bar Association

Electronic Access in the
Fifth Circuit
Kenneth Russo, Clerk’s Office
U.S. Court of Appeals, 5th Circuit
Agenda
 Citation Recognition and the Federal Judiciary
 Electronic Records in the 5th Circuit
 Electronic Documents and the iPad
 Moving Forward
Citation Recognition: How it works
 System automatically recognizes new documents and
retrieves them for citation recognition
 Stores data about the citations that can later be used to
create an overlay of hyperlinks when a document is retrieved
 The original document in CM/ECF is not modified.
 As the citation definitions are enhanced the citations
recognized for documents are enhanced.
Search Engine Agnostic
 Westlaw Classic/Next
 Lexis
 Google Scholar/Google
 Bing
 Yahoo
 In the future: Casemaker, Fastcase, Lexis Advanced
Citations currently recognized
 Cases from the various federal reporters
 Major federal statutes and rules
 Statutes from Texas, Louisiana and Mississippi (and assorted
other states)
 5th Circuit Rules
 Sentencing guidelines (albeit points to current set on
Westlaw)
 Record on Appeal Citations
 CM/ECF Document Citations!
Electronic Record
 Goals:
 Improve means by which court attorneys can access record.
 Reduced costs to circuit
Electronic Records
 To date 6,029 electronic records have been created.
 5.5+ million pages
 35,000+ volumes
 24 electronic records have been printed.
 Estimated savings across the circuit of at least a quarter
million dollars, or roughly 10 FTEs at the national average.
Electronic Record cont.
 5th Circuit District Courts requested we reduce the number of
paper records required.
 In response we created a new, electronic ROA system
(hereinafter Eroa).
 We continue to retrieve all documents for the record.
 Documents are automatically categorized according to subject
matter (e.g. pleadings, transcripts, sealed documents, etc).
 All pages in the electronic record are uniquely stamped;
supplemental filings no longer start at page 1.
 We passed a local rule this fall requiring attorneys to follow a
new citation format: ROA.### where ### is the page number.
Record Citations
 ROA.123 – page 123 in the current case
 ROA.12-12345.123 – page 123 in case 12-12345
 ROA.12, 15-19, 350 – links to pages 12, 15 and 350
ECF Document Citations
 ECF 17 – link to page 1 of document 17
 ECF 17-2 – link to page 1 of document 17, 2nd document
 ECF 17,5 – link to page 5 of document 17
 ECF 17, 5, 10 – links to pages 5 and 10 of document 17
 ECF 12-12345,17 – link to page 1, doc 17, case 12-12345
Cims4iPad
 Custom application developed for 5th Circuit
 Enables seamless access to pending matters, case
documents and information, and, of course, the electronic
record.
 The embedded PDF viewer has extensive annotation support
as well as understanding of the various citation hyperlinks
including support for Westlaw, Lexis, and the electronic
record (EROA).
Coming Soon
 Electronic delivery of records to attorneys via CM/ECF
 Not PACER
 Free download
 Record volumes will be tied to attorney CM/ECF accounts
 Links to records are good only for the specific attorney
 Live: January, 2015
Coming Soon cont.
 CM/ECF Document Citations for Attorney use
 Code is written for district
 Ready for a court to pull the trigger and turn them on