2021 Judicial Conference Program

How Did the Committee Navigate Covid-19 Challenges? As the courts and associated administrative offices reduced operations due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the committee continued to meet entirely remotely utilizing Skype for Business. Meeting documents were distributed via e-mail. As the courts and administrative offices entered into the phased re-opening, the committee has continued to meet using Skype for Business for those who were unable to meet together in-person. Overall, the Committee prioritized meeting topics related to COVID-19 supplies (laptops or other technology hardware) and issues (remote court hearings, updating forms, new remote protocols). The Committee also focused on working through any challenges associated with the MDEC go-live in Montgomery County since all staff was working remotely. MDEC Advisory Subcommittee Membership for the subcommittee consisted of key staff from Montgomery and Prince Georges counties. Throughout the year, the subcommittee addressed issues related to MDEC implementation. Data Governance Subcommittee This subcommittee was established in 2020 to develop a centralized structure for policies regarding the Judiciary’s data. The subcommittee reviewed the National Center for State Courts Data Governance Policy and the Judiciary’s Data Analytics Work Group recommendations. To that end, the subcommittee began reviewing policies for standardized data representation, data exchanges, and data analytics with the goal of providing a data governance structure. As a new subcommittee, the members are still working to review, revise, and suggest policy considerations for the Major Projects Committee deliberations. Following the initial meeting, four work groups were formed to begin working on different policy areas: 1. Scope of Data: This work group discussed various types of judicial records and recommended that case data be prioritized in developing any records portals, dashboards, or other access. 2. Data Ownership and Retention: This work group met and discussed the distinction between data custodian and record custodian, as well as the retention of electronic records and their archival issues. The work group is developing recommendations on archiving records. 3. Data Access: This work group is reviewing the Access Rules to determine if any changes should be recommended. 4. Data Usage: This work group met and reviewed the need for bulk data standards, the distinction between commercial and non-commercial requestors, screen scraping, the use of the data dashboard for aggregate data, and the development of a data request form. National Open Court Data Standards Work Group The Conference of State Court Administrators and the National Center for State Courts developed business and technical court data standards to support the creation, sharing, and integration of court data. The data elements included in the NODS project are those elements most likely to be requested by and shared with other agencies, researchers, and the public. The NODS Work Group was formed under the Data Governance Subcommittee to map the Judiciary MDEC case categories and data elements to the NODS standards. NODS categorized cases into the following seven groupings: civil, criminal, dependency, family, juvenile, probate, and traffic & local ordinance. The first task the work group undertook was to map MDEC case categories to the case categories defined by NODS. MDEC has four case categories, so an effort to identify how the four categories in MDEC mapped over to the seven case categories in NODS was completed in August. In order to adequately map to the seven categories, the work group looked at the MDEC case category in conjunction with the case type. In addition to mapping the four MDEC case categories to the seven NODS categories, the work group also reviewed how case categories/types aligned across other reporting vehicles, such as the Annual Statistical Abstract used for the data dashboard and the Court Statistics Project. The work group is currently working to complete the NODS criminal data mapping spreadsheet. After completion of the criminal category, the SUBCOMMITTEES AND WORK GROUPS

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