1356 - Rebuild the Appellate Inmate E-Filing Application

Introduction:

When an incarcerated individual at the Department of Corrections (DOC) needs to file documents for their trial court case or if they file a complaint about the DOC to the Appellate Courts, they use an electronic filing system known as Inmate E-Filing. Once the document is filed, the appellate courts are able to act on those documents. Currently, eight DOC prisons use the Inmate E-Filing application. During this file delivery process, the files go through validations, numerous network folders and syncing before they reach the OnBase Document Management System.

The process begins when an incarcerated individual at a prison completes their needed documents to file with the Appellate Court. The incarcerated individual first presents the documents to a DOC representative. The representative scans the documents into a Multi-Function Device (MFD) which begins the process of delivering them to the designated court (e.g. Court of Appeals I, II or II; or the Supreme Court). Once the DOC representative scans the documents into the MFD, they enter the needed subject line information which consists of the prison ID, incarcerated individual's last name, DOC number and the Appellate case number. The documents are then emailed to the AOC supported designated email address (each of the four courts has their own unique email address). From there, the system will process the file using the ColdFusion E-Filing code, SureSync (carries the files from ColdFusion to OnBase ingestion folder) and then deliver the document in OnBase.

How the System Works:

The Appellate Inmate E-Filing system consists of three major components:

1. ColdFusion application (written and maintained by AOC's Web Services Team)
   1. ColdFusion is responsible for initial processing, generating the CSV file, and generating an E-Filing transmittal that contains information about the document being filed, who filed it, when it was filed and who it was sent to. Then, a timestamp with the word “Received” watermark is applied to the e-filed document. Lastly, the modified e-filed document and CSV are placed on a web pickup folder.
2. SureSync (a vendor product maintained by AOC Infrastructure team)
   1. SureSync is responsible to move the e-filed packet from the web pickup folder to an internal OnBase pickup folder.
3. OnBase (a vendor product maintained by AOC ISD Operations team).
   1. OnBase then performs a process called Optical Character Recognition (OCR). This is a technology that recognizes text within a digital image. It is commonly used to recognize text in scanned documents and images. OCR software is used to convert a physical paper document, or an image into an accessible electronic version with text. For OnBase, once the document goes through the OCR process, the court users are able to search for document(s) using text and any documents that contains the said text will appear in the search results. Once the documents are uploaded into OnBase, the Inmate E-filing system sends filing confirmation emails to the filer, the court, and if applicable, existing parties to the case. The filing transmittal sheet is included in the email.

Current State:

Issue #1:Sometimes the file uploading process fails and does not deliver the documents due to a variety of reasons or issues. Some of the issues include the files not processing correctly resulting in the failed delivery of file(s) into OnBase. When this happens, no one is notified of the issue from a systematic standpoint as there is no monitoring and notification throughout the ingestion process. There is monitoring and notification in the OnBase ingestion folders where if files begin to pile up without movement and/or if a single file gets stuck in one location for a period of time, the technical team is systematically notified. In ColdFusion and SureSync, there is no monitoring and notification. This requires that someone from the business team to check all inmate E-Filings each day to ensure the files made it into OnBase correctly. In 2019, it was discovered that 29 files did not make it into OnBase as they did not process correctly without anyone knowing. This resulted in four things: 1) Three cases were dismissed because the files did not make it to the Appellate Courts, therefore the courts assumed that the incarcerated individual did not fulfill their requirements. 2) An enhancement request was submitted in 2019 to add monitoring and notification. 3) Since the enhancement request (no yet worked on), the business team has been checking each file each day to make sure they make it into OnBase. 4) The level of trust that the customer has in the reliability of the system has decreased. In the past six months, there has been 24 instances where files did not make it past ColdFusion and/or SureSync and had the business not checked, found them, and reprocessed them, no one would have known that the files did not make it into OnBase. These failures significantly increase the risk of case dismissals and non-compliance.

Issue #2: The current Inmate E-Filing system does not automatically handle undelivered e-mail, or alert technicians of failed e-mail delivery when a bad email address is used to deliver the filed document to case participants. No automation currently exists to automatically prevent, detect, or alert technicians of undelivered e-mail.

Issue #3: There was work done by Web Services in 2019 where if DOC entered an incorrect subject line, the file would go to the Initial Filing Take Work Queue (for Supreme Court documents) and the Initial Filing Review Queue (for Court of Appeals documents) in OnBase. An example of an incorrect subject line is when certain data element(s) are not entered into the subject line. This ensured that although the subject line was incorrect, the documents still made it to the courts. Now, there must be manual intervention by business staff to watch for and re-process those emails with bad subject line because this enhancement no longer works.

Issue #4: On receipt of electronically filed documents (e-File and Inmate e-File), the system generates an automatic e-mail response to the sender (and associated case parties), which constitutes “legal service” of filed appellate documents from the courts. The e-mail response contains a PDF copy of the document and a hyperlink directly to the document file, which is stored on internal AOC servers. Upon click of the link, there is no authentication/authorization challenge, instead the document simply opens. This poses a security risk that must be addressed.

The Web Services team does not have the capacity to address these issues. The AOC Information Services Division (ISD) has completed a Proof of Concept (POC) to rebuild the Inmate E-Filing in a different coding language and add some enhancements to make the Inmate E-Filing system more reliable as well as addressing the issues mentioned above.

Requested Change

Rebuild the Inmate E-Filing Application using the Proof of Concept (POC) developed by ISD in 2021. The hope is that the new application will address all of the issues listed above. The POC team created a .Net application which is designed to be executed by the windows scheduler service throughout the day every five minutes.

The new system shall be dependable, supportable, secure and bug free with the following goals in mind:

1. Ensure the Department of Corrections (DOC) can continue to send inmate e-filings as they do today.
2. Ensure the Appellate Courts receive the e-filed documents into OnBase, even if DOC enters an incorrect subject line.
3. Ensure the filer, the court and if necessary other case participants receive the filed document(s) via email as they do today.
4. Simplify the Inmate eFiling process by removing SureSync and the extra folder hops.
5. Provide unified logging and monitoring so that if files are stuck or not moving as expected, the system notifies the AOC when there is a problem.
6. Ensure the bad email addresses do not go unnoticed and the AOC is informed when this happens so that the emails can be corrected and files can be delivered as expected.
7. There are new data elements on the CSV file that can be used in OnBase to search for document easily no matter where the document has landed.
8. Ensure there is no link to documents within the transmittal email to ensure people are not able to access documents housed in the system without authorization and authentication.

The rebuilding of the Appellate Inmate E-Filing Application will make it more reliable, efficient, secure and easier to support.