OASIS Litigant Portal (LP) TC

Aubrie Souza Court Management Consultant she/her/hers asouza@ncsc.org   Sign up for the A2J Newsletter here.   ncsc.org

 

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Here is Margaret Hagan's suggestion for an LPTC project.  My reaction is positive – eminently doable and worthwhile. 

 

Aubrie – can you send this on to the other TC members?  Thanks.

 

 

 

Hi John,

Hope you are doing well!

 

I have been thinking about your question about the Oasis committee & possible tasks.

 

I am increasingly excited about technical standards for Data Exchanges for Verification, in which:

 

• The court needs to verify something about a litigant

• Verify eligibility for a court fee waiver, by looking at participation in another government program only for low-income people
• Verify ability to pay, for traffic tickets or court debt/legal financial obligations
• Verify participation in a government-run program that is part of a court-mandated plan, like in the new diversion courts for homelessness, etc.

• The court, ideally within its case management system, can send requests with identifiers for litigants to other agencies' administrative databases (food stamps, rental assistance, Medicaid, other state-run programs – or federal programs like SSI) to do a simple confirmation: does this person exist in your current program rolls?
• The other agency's data system responds back with a yes/no about the person being present in their rolls
• The court case management system now records this verification information, and presents it in the case file to the clerk, judge, or other decision-maker as they assess the case

 

I know this is happening in California with the MyCitation traffic ticket tool – where they have connected the court with the food stamps program Calfresh.  I have also heard about it in Allegheny County, where the court was connecting to the rental assistance agency to see if eviction litigants were waiting on rental assistance.

 

I'd love to see this happen systematically, and with participation by case management system vendors.

 

What do you think? I'd be very happy to work with you & the Oasis group on this.

Best, Margaret

I think this is a great idea where standards, and OASIS and NIEM specifically, and entity resolution systems could help but this is not really something to be solved by a "litigant portal" workgroup.  This sort of exchange would apply to all sorts of litigants, not just SRLs.

If we wanted to create a new technical committee to tackle this, we should recruit participation from not just the courts but some of the providers, both in benefits and diversion programs.  Ideally, that would also include some of the implementations Margaret mentioned. I have contacts at Global Justice who developed the Ability to Pay app in CA if that helps.