WHILE MOST OF the world is ramping up for the 21st century, the New Hampshire judicial branch is struggling to emerge from the 1980s, technologically speaking.

The Administrative Office of the Courts this year is approaching a financially pressed Legislature to renew a request for funding to move from its current DOS-based case-management database to a Windows-based one. The courts are seeking $3.4 million-either as a capital outlay or in the court operating budget-over a three-to-five-year period to accomplish the task, which officials say will permit the courts to operate more efficiently and provide better, faster access to information for court personnel, other agencies, the legislature, attorneys and the public. The money would fund hardware and software updates and corresponding employee training, all of which would pave the way for other innovations such as electronic case filing, digital recording of proceedings and imaging of records, which would produce additional efficiency and better service, court officials say.

The request, the Judicial Branch Information Technology Plan, is the latest attempt by the courts to restart their stalled computerization efforts. After a promising start in the early 1990s, modernization of the courts' information systems slowed to a virtual standstill while the pace of technological change elsewhere accelerated.

Thomas Edwards, the AOC's information technology manager, said the court system accomplished several milestones in the 1990s-creating a comprehensive case management system, moving all trial courts onto a single case management system and creating a local area network (LAN) at each court site. These conversions were aided by funding from a surcharge added to fines and the use of federal funds to support collaboration and communication with other agencies addressing criminal justice, child welfare and domestic violence prevention needs. (See sidebar.)

But starting in the mid-'90s, attempts to obtain state funding to update the core operations software and equipment to the Windows operating system failed, and the courts quickly slipped behind the technology curve. Progress slowed even further in 1998 when Governor Jeanne Shaheen vetoed continuation of the Court Modernization Fund (CMF), a surcharge on criminal and motor vehicle fines that provided the judicial branch with an estimated $425,000 per year, most of which was spent on technology.

Ironically, the Supreme Court and, recently, the Superior Court easily joined the information age by creating an automatic e-mail subscriber list for published opinions posted on the state government Web site, WEBSTER. Edwards said the list provides immediate notification and distribution of decisions to more than 1,100 subscribers.

But moving the bulk of the courts' day-to-day work-some 200,000 case filings amounting to nearly 5 million pages of material filed annually-won't be as easy as updating a Web site.

Superior Court Associate Justice Larry Smukler, chair of a court technology committee, said the court nevertheless is ready: the vision is there, plans are drawn up, and the communications infrastructure is in place for modernization-but the court cannot move forward without a big jump to a Windows operating system.

Smukler, an avowed technology enthusiast, envisions a more efficient, more accessible justice system where attorneys and the public could file documents with the courts from their computers. "The courts could then record the filings, and then zap it to the parties. And then the public would have immediate access to the actions of the court," Smukler said.

Instead, Edwards said the courts' obsolete technology plods along, competently recording the actions of the courts on self-contained databases, and then extracting information using COBOL-a language that in technological terms is deader than Latin. No vendors support the obsolete software, and judges and other employees operate in an environment without easy access to their own information, cut off from the Internet, e-mail and today's common methods of information transfer. Superior Court Chief Justice Walter Murphy laments that judges in their chambers can't use their computers to retrieve information stored in their own courthouses. To date, only the Supreme Court, AOC and the Superior Court offices in Concord can utilize e-mail.

Last year, the court's antiquated information technology became the subject of legal skirmishing within the judicial branch when legal system critic Theodore Kamasinski sought a list of all cases decided by then-Superior Court Chief Justice Joseph P. Nadeau, who had been nominated for the NH Supreme Court. Kamasinski rebutted the AOC's contentions that such indexes were unavailable and the Supreme Court surprised many by responding to Kamasinski's petition with an order to the AOC and Nadeau to explain why the desired information wasn't available. Both Nadeau and AOC director Donald Goodnow, through legal counsel, responded with a 102-page appendix detailing the courts' efforts to modernize their systems. (The Supreme Court later that year decided not to hear the case.)

Kamasinski contended the overwhelming majority of the courts' files are public information and should be releasable to anyone; the AOC has contended that in its current state of automation, specific cases can only be unearthed by specifically identifying document numbers or case names.

The archaic court computers also impede the work of other government agencies, such as law enforcement and child support authorities. A document prepared to support this year's request provides this example:

"Criminal cases are initiated on paper documents by police departments and prosecutors and are heard and decided in the courts. When there is a decision, details of that action and any sentence are transmitted to the Department of Safety, the Department of Corrections and back to the police departments and prosecutors; disposition information is now sent by mail. The receiving agency then keys the information into their computer system. This transfer of information is highly inefficient and prone to backlog and human error."

Similarly, requests for specific reports and summaries of case information that would be useful to other agencies-such as juvenile crime, abuse and neglect and CHINS trends data for the Department of Health and Human Services-are not easily compiled.

Court officials are aware that the current legislative and fiscal climate makes any judicial funding request a long shot, but feel there's no choice but to continue the push for what they believe is necessary. Otherwise, officials say, obsolete court technology will continue to frustrate the public and other governmental agencies.

"The criminal justice community is the single biggest consumer of court information and it is currently disadvantaged in the fight against crime by our inability to present case information to them electronically and in a timely manner," states the court technology budget request. "The public cannot get access to case information to which they are constitutionally entitled as our computing capabilities exist today and they are also handicapped indirectly by the legislature's inability to get information from the courts for public policy evaluations."

The courts' technology proposal, part of its $59.6 million Fiscal Year 2002 budget request, will be taken up by the House Finance Committee sometime in February, Goodnow said.

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