Today I am at day two of the Washington State Supreme Court Boards and Commissions Visioning Process. During the first day of the committee, we did not make a lot of progress, but It looks like that will change.  The project as been basically restarted with significantly more focus and direction.  This first meeting is focusing on orienting the members for the project to the roles and practices of the existing Commissions. At the beginning of the meeting it was made clear that we are here to focus on presenting ideas to help improve the commission system from a strategic perspective. As important as the focus is what we have not been asked to do, we have not been asked to  eliminating programs. We are not an implementation committee, we will stop working with a suggestion paper that focus on the strategy not the detailed tactics.

Todays meeting will specifically look at 10 committees or commissions and what they do through presentations by committee members:

Presentation 1: The Access to Justice Boards (ATJ) Justice without Barriers Committee, by Merrie Gough.

This is a new sub committee that has been formed with in the last year.  The ATJ Board asked the impediments committee, which worked on disability and accessibility issues, and the Pro Se Committee which focused on self help and litigants.

Accomplishments:

  • Create and find Funding for a disability coordinator at the Administrative Office of the Courts
  • Help create GR 33 a court based implementation the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA)
  • Creation of needs assessment for Pro-Se litigants

Challenges

  • Limited resources
  • Limited funding that expires in June for some of the committees work
  • Knowledge of other similar projects

Ideas for improving

  • Better communications with other committees
  • focus on status impediments & system impediments – are the

Current projects:

  • Plain Language forms
  • Self Help Center from Pro Se litigants

Stats:
Funding: ATJ Board funds, Grants, 50k from Supreme court (a 2 year fund request), staff support 2 to 3 full time staff from WSBA 300k to 400k a year from license fees.
Staff: 2 to 3  staff members part time
Reports to: ATJ Board
Target populations: Pro Se, people with disabilities, anyone with other barriers to ATJ such as geographic or language.

Q: How is the Self help project different from Washington Law Help?
A: The work of the committee is still strategic at this point.

Q: Who has approval power?
A: the ATJ Board

Q: How active in oversight is the ATJ Board on committees?
A: The committees are mostly independent, they report to the ATJ Board yearly and to make periodic reports as projects are completed

Presentation 2: ATJ Technology – Dexter Mejia from AoC

My notes on this session are a little light, I ended up answering some of the Q&A and helping a little with the presentation. I have been on this committee for 5 years now. One of the committees strengths is the diversity, the committee.  The technology committee has techies, lawyers, Judges, marketers, academics, librarians that are both from inside the justice system and outside.

Stats: same as ATJ Justice without barriers
Target Populations: AoC, JISC, WSBA anyone that provides technology to the community

Challenges:

  • Funding, must of the projects ATJ Tech does are unfunded.  One prime examples ATJWeb.org . This is a good website, that could be a blog and a place (CMS) to share best practices, but three years after the launch it does not have staff to update it.
  • Implementation of projects

Suggestions:

  • More partnerships like the liaison position that shares knowledge with the Judaical Information Systems Committee (JISC)
  • Iterations – we need more resources to update older projects as tech moves forward
  • More partnerships, we need to resources share and communicate with other commissions
  • Cooperative governance – possibly a work group that shares knowledge over upcoming projects

Time is getting short on this meeting.  At 11am we have 2 hours for 8 more presentations.  We made it through 2 presentations in the first 2 hours, I do not think I can keep up blogging the rest of the presentation given how quickly the final presentations will need to be made.  I will see about posting some of the handouts from the meeting in an update.