The pilot comprises three Pillars — our high-level goals. As described further below, we believe that progress on these three pillars will ultimately help to enable scalable, multi-jurisdictional solutions that better serve self-represented litigants, legal aid organizations, and the courts themselves.

Common Fields Coordination: Litigants can make, and courts accept, submissions for Name Change, Eviction Answers, and/or Fee Waiver actions that utilize fields from the common fields list while also accommodating distinct state requirements.

Low-Burden Filing Protocols: Statewide filings can be made through online tools that meet agreed-upon criteria (including via informal systems, robust efiling protocols, or APIs); to enable those filings, courts reduce other manual administrative burdens for which electronic solutions exist.

Strategies to Encourage Sustainable Solutions: Courts certify and promote online tool(s) for civil litigants and, to the extent possible, facilitate certification standards that will ease entry for future providers and tools in other issue areas.

Pillar 1: Aligning common form fields & maintaining a cross-jurisdiction “data dictionary”

For any given form, some fields are common across jurisdictions, while others are unique to only one or two jurisdictions. Two strategies aim to align these fields more readily:

• For common fields, we aim to develop a single definition and output, agreed upon across states and committed to by jurisdictions.
• For unique fields, we aim to provide a standard format for updatable, consistently maintained state lists, and to streamline where reasonable and worthwhile.

The end goal of this pillar is a “data dictionary” of common fields in a format that jurisdictions will implement. Fields that are unique to each jurisdiction will be in a format that permits easy integration. This dictionary will have an accompanying protocol for maintaining reliability; agreed-upon standards that draw upon best practices; and a database structure that ensures accessibility and scalability.

Other groups have already established valuable infrastructure and document assembly pilots.

• The National Open Court Data Standards (NODS) has established data standards for court data, particularly the data saved in court case management systems. The Conference of State Court Administrators and the National Center for State Courts (NCSC) established NODS.
• The OASIS LegalXML Electronic Court Filing TC has established data standards for providers who transmit legal documents into the court as efiling providers. These standards allow third-party groups to interface with courts, letting these providers help attorneys and litigants submit documents and related data.
• Nonprofit groups like Suffolk LIT Lab and ProBonoNet, with the support of funders like the Legal Services Corporation and the Pew Charitable Trusts, have built interactive document assembly tools that litigants can use for free to fill in state court forms. They have built authoring systems, like the Document Assembly Line & Law Help Interactive, that allow courts and legal aid groups to convert paper forms to interactive websites for people to use.

A data dictionary will permit easy implementation of plain language interview systems that capture the data needed to generate and coordinate the forms required for each matter type, without the litigant needing to determine which forms are necessary and having to follow multiple and often duplicative instructions.

Pillar 2: Allowing meaningful efiling for all litigants & reducing associated burdens

For the aligned forms to be truly transformative, they must be submittable through efiling so that self-represented litigants can access the system. We are promoting this route by:

• Urging jurisdictions to adopt either traditional efiling systems, a PDF-based system aligned with CMS, or API and data exchanges; and
• Promoting policies to make reasonable reductions in efiling burdens, including notarization, wet signatures, public notice, criminal record checks, and fingerprint requirements, for the length of the pilot (if not beyond).

The goal of this pillar is to create an environment where tech providers are confident that the tools they build can electronically submit form fields in a standard format, with clearly documented protocols and the assurance that local clerks will comply.

Pillar 3: Enabling and supporting sustainable solutions, with benefits of scale

While Pillars 1 and 2 will lay the groundwork for new solutions, we will also consider additional incentives and constraints that might help shape the efiling ecosystem. Together with court leadership and technology providers, we’ll promote strategies to encourage, fund, and support solutions. These might include (among others) supporting grant- or revenue-funded business models, facilitating referrals from court sites and other hubs, and, with support from courts and legal aid organizations, facilitating rigorous user testing prior to launch.

In addition, our team — along with jurisdiction leadership — will consider key metrics for any possible court-endorsed tech tool. Among other things, FFP-aligned and court-endorsed tools should be:

1. Discoverable & usable: any FFP-aligned tools should rank high on Google Search, have best-in-class (modern, quick, responsive) tech, and be low-burden to use; analytics should show that people find, use, and complete the relevant forms.
2. Provably effective: FFP-aligned tools should demonstrably improve procedural and substantive outcomes, including by enabling straightforward information collection and assembly, speedy filing, and should allow for rigorous evaluation.
3. Maintained & sustainable: court-endorsed tools should continue to have accurate content, ideally in multiple languages, and best-in-class tech in the years after their initial builds.
4. Values-aligned: tools should allow for free or low-cost form access and completion, should not harvest identifiable data, and should be sensitive to the needs of, and challenges facing, self-represented litigants.