Although many of my acquaintances seem pleased that the California Administrative Office of the Courts is getting its comeuppance by the recent press attention to what is reported to be a $2 billion (with a B) price tag on developing a dubious new statewide automated case management system dubbed CCMS (California Case Management System), I have hesitated to write on this topic for two reasons. First, I have many friends in the AOC and California courts, second, the AOC is not as evil as many portray them to be. But this monumental screw-up does deserve commentary.

I have yet to find any statewide Administrative Office of the Courts in this country that is not held in either strong suspicion or outright contempt. Most of this is attributable to generic line vs staff tensions in which those who work in the trial court trenches resent second guessing by administrative personnel in remote locations, many of whom never worked in a court.

My own experience in CA mirrors this sentiment, which was exacerbated in the 1970s in the Chief Justice Rose Bird era when then-Administrative Director Ralph Gampbell used to bewilder the trial courts with his sycophantic devotion to the loopy Chief. However, the current AOC, while not entirely lacking in the dysfunction department, is a product of a long and tough journey that:

• Merged the general and limited jurisdiction trial courts into single, countywide entities;
• Transformed uneven local funding into state funding of operations;
• Migrated court staff from local to state judicial branch employees; and,
• Morphed a patchwork quilt of local rules, forms and procedures into a more cohesive, uniform scheme.

In this process, they shored up the family courts with a series of innovative programs that included court-annexed mediation of child custody issues and the creation of a family court facilitator position. Countless numbers of task forces and commissions also addressed court administrative problems such as elimination of bias, managing of the court record, jury management/compensation, etc. Finally, while still a work in progress and Herculean in its enormity, their work to take ownership of locally owned court facilities is commendable.

But even this impressive track record is scant excuse for committing such a staggering amount of scarce resources to building a case management system that would simultaneously meet the superior court operational needs of mammoth Los Angeles and microscopic Alpine counties. Oddly, the AOC was on the right path earlier this decade when they embarked on an effort to pre-qualify a set number of commercial off-the-shelf case management system vendors from which trial courts could choose for automated solutions while requiring the winning firms to adhere to prescribed data reporting and interoperability protocols. Near the end of this effort, the AOC abruptly pulled the plug on the strategy and announced its intentions to build its own statewide system. The rest, as they say, is history.

Now, the naysayers are coming out of the woodwork to pile on to the media and legislative circus looking into the whys and wherefores of this fiasco, even spawning a watchdog blog of masked avenger(s) playing one-upmanship by exposing internal examples of further AOC dysfunction.

So who wins this game? The trial courts? No – they continue to need new data systems and now have to endure even further delays in acquiring them. The CA courts as a whole? No – scarce public funding will become even scarcer as legislators’ trust levels evaporate. The public? Only to the extent that CCMS will probably have to abort development before the estimated $2 billion price tag is reached – otherwise the public will suffer lack of adequate information management among the trial courts and the resulting inefficiencies.

So to my friends in the CA trial courts and AOC, take heart. Many of us feel your pain.

Photo credit = California Dreamin’ by the Mamas and the Papas

This entry was posted on Monday, November 2nd, 2009 at 5:20 pm and is filed under Court Management, Finances, Personal, Technology.You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.