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Call to Vote: Ballot for OASIS Standard – Electronic Court Filing V4.01

The OASIS LegalXML Electronic Court Filing TC members [1] have approved submitting the following Candidate OASIS Standard to the OASIS membership to a membership vote for OASIS Standard:

Electronic Court Filing Version 4.01
Candidate OASIS Standard 01
17 January 2013

This is a call to the primary or alternate representatives of OASIS Organizational Members to vote. The Technical Committee has satisfied all requirements of the OASIS TC Process and the Candidate OASIS Standard is now submitted to the voting representatives of OASIS organizational members.

— Voting Details —

The ballot opens on 09 May 2013 at 00:00 GMT and closes on 23 May 2013 at 23:59 GMT. You can access the ballot to cast your vote at:

Internal OASIS link: https://www.oasis-open.org/apps/org/workgroup/voting/ballot.php?id=2407

Publicly visible link: https://www.oasis-open.org/committees/ballot.php?id=2407

The minimum number of affirmative votes required to approve this ballot is 49 (15% of 323).

Each OASIS organizational member has one vote. OASIS members should ensure that their organization’s voting representative votes according to the organization’s wishes. If you do not know the name of your organization’s voting representative is, go to the My Account page at

http://www.oasis-open.org/members/user_tools

then click the link for your Company (at the top of the page) and review the list of users for the name designated as “Primary”.

— Information about the Candidate OASIS Standard and the LegalXML Electronic Court Filing TC —

This specification describes the technical architecture and the functional features needed to accomplish a successful system for submitting electronic filings to courts of law. It defines both the normative (required) and non-normative (optional) business processes it supports. The non-functional requirements associated with electronic filing transactions, as well as the actions and services needed to accomplish the transactions, such as network and security infrastructures, are defined in related specifications, namely:

– Service interaction profile specifications that define communications infrastructures, within which electronic filing transactions can take place;
– Document signature profile specifications that define mechanisms for stating or ensuring that a person signed a particular document.

This specification supports a number of automated information exchanges such as:

– Transmission of documents in electronic form from law firms and from other persons and organizations to a court for entry (“official filing”) into the court’s official case records;
– Recording of documents in electronic form from members of the court and court administrators into the court’s official case records;
– Transmission of data needed to complete (or demonstrate the previous completion of) financial transactions involving filing fees or the payment of any other court fees, fines and financial obligations;
– Transmission of the metadata needed to initiate a new case record in a court’s automated case management system (CMS) when the document being transmitted is one that commences a new case in that court;
– Messages returned to the sender that confirm a court’s receipt of the sender’s filing message;
– Messages notifying the sender of events such as the entry of the document(s) submitted by the sender into the court record (or an error message stating that the document[s] could not be accepted for filing and stating the reason[s] why);
– Transmission of copies of documents submitted for filing to the other parties in a case who are registered to receive service electronically.

This specification defines a set of core structures that are common to most types of court filings and defines specific structures that apply to filing documents in the following types of court cases:

– Appellate
– Bankruptcy
– Civil (including general civil, mental health, probate and small claims)
– Criminal (both felony and misdemeanor)
– Domestic relations (including divorce, separation, child custody and child support, domestic violence and parentage, i.e., maternity or paternity)
– Juvenile (both delinquency and dependency)
– Violations (including traffic, ordinances and parking)

The basic structure will support other types of court filings and is extensible through court-specific and case-type-specific extensions.

National Information Exchange Model (NIEM) conformance, as defined by the NIEM Implementation Guidelines (NIEM Guide), is a core objective of this specification. The NIEM is an XML standard designed specifically for justice information exchanges. ECF V4.01 uses the NIEM version 2.0 where the structures and definitions correspond to the requirements of ECF V4.01.

OASIS Universal Business Language (UBL) is an OASIS Standard that provides a single ubiquitous language for business communication, and takes into account the requirements common to all enterprises. ECF V4.01 employs OASIS Universal Business Language (UBL) to describe filing payments and payment receipts.

The W3C XML Signature Syntax and Processing (XMLSIG) specification describes a mechanism for signing electronic documents. ECF V4.01 employs the XMLSIG specification to describe digital signatures applied to the entire ECF V4.01 message.

OASIS Reference Model for Service Oriented Architecture (SOA-RM) is a framework for understanding significant entities, and the relationships between those entities, within a service-oriented architecture. ECF V4.01 describes such an architecture and includes terminology that conforms to the SOA-RM.

OASIS Code List Representation (Genericode) is a model and XML schema that can be used to encode a broad range of code list information. All ECF V4.01 code lists that are not defined in the NIEM are provided in Genericode 1.0 format.

ECF V4.01 received Statements of Use from Intresys Inc., ImageSoft Inc., and URL Integration Inc. [2].

URIs:
The prose specification document and related files are available here:

Editable Source (Authoritative):
http://docs.oasis-open.org/legalxml-courtfiling/specs/ecf/v4.01/ecf-v4.01-spec/cos01/ecf-v4.01-spec-cos01.doc

HTML:
http://docs.oasis-open.org/legalxml-courtfiling/specs/ecf/v4.01/ecf-v4.01-spec/cos01/ecf-v4.01-spec-cos01.html

PDF:
http://docs.oasis-open.org/legalxml-courtfiling/specs/ecf/v4.01/ecf-v4.01-spec/cos01/ecf-v4.01-spec-cos01.pdf

Distribution ZIP files:

For your convenience, OASIS provides a complete package of the prose specifications and related files in a ZIP distribution file. You can download the ZIP file here:

http://docs.oasis-open.org/legalxml-courtfiling/specs/ecf/v4.01/ecf-v4.01-spec/cos01/ecf-v4.01-spec-cos01.zip

— Additional information —

[1] OASIS LegalXML Electronic Court Filing TC
http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/legalxml-courtfiling/

TC Charter
https://www.oasis-open.org/committees/legalxml-courtfiling/charter.php

[2] Statements of Use:
Intresys Inc.:
https://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/legalxml-courtfiling/201301/msg00015/StatementOfUse.IntresysToECFTC.DOCX

ImageSoft Inc.:
https://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/legalxml-courtfiling/201209/msg00017/ECF_Statement_of_Use.pdf

URL Integration Inc.:
https://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/legalxml-courtfiling/201208/msg00042.html