Several developments are converging to spur the Supreme Court to revive the idea of modernizing the state's procedural rules for both civil and criminal matters, Associate Justice Linda S. Dalianis reports.

The court plans to use as a template the proposed New Hampshire Rules of Civil Procedure, which the Supreme Court rejected almost 10 years ago. Justice Dalianis plans to discuss this project in more detail at the Feb. 18 NHBA Midyear Membership Meeting. Dalianis will join other leaders of the court system, including Supreme Court Chief Justice John T. Broderick, Jr., Superior Court Chief Justice Robert J. Lynn, District Court and Family Division Administrative Judge Edwin W. Kelly, and Probate Court Administrative Judge John R. Maher for an NHBA CLE program, "New Developments in Statewide Court Practice: A Conversation Between Bench & Bar." Chief Justice Brock, who will lead the discussion taking place from 2:30 to 4:30 p.m., said it will touch on a wide range of topics involving every level of the courts and will depend heavily on questions and comments from the audience.

Justice Dalianis, who chairs the Advisory Committee on Rules, said several trends are key to the court's renewed attention to procedural rules and its desire to bring the current "patchwork" of rules to a body of rules modeled on the federal procedural rules. Those trends are:

• a coming rollout of a new computerized case management system, which is expected to start later this year. Computerizing the system necessitates greater standardization and consistency in procedures among the courts.

• a necessary byproduct of the implementation of the case management system "business process reengineering" of the courts' case-handling procedures. As the federal court's implementation of electronic filing has demonstrated, computerized case management inevitably alters how things are done internally. Thus, if the courts' internal processes must change, then procedural rule changes are unavoidable.

• developing policies that protect sensitive information and regulate the more widespread public access that will occur as court records are added to the case management system, and, ultimately, become available on the Internet.

The Supreme Court has also indicated that it intends to do more to make all of the courts more "user-friendly" and accessible to pro se litigants. Proponents of the NHRCP in 1994 contended that a more systematic set of rules would make it easier for self-represented litigants or newer lawyers to learn about and navigate the system. Opponents of the change asserted that a system with more rules, while perhaps more predictable, would be too rigid; in the words of attorney Michael Callahan, the traditional system allowed "more play in the joints."

Martin Honigberg, of Sulloway & Hollis, and a member of the Rules Advisory Committee, will head up a subcommittee that will work on the procedural rules review. Honigberg, a member of the NHBA Board of Governors, said the effort was too new to suggest a timetable. An initial effort will be to look at the ten-year-old NHRCP to determine which areas need to be updated.

Justice Dalianis said she wants to alert the Bar "early on that we are going to be looked at these rules again" and welcomes their input.

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