The judicial branch commissioned @18F to do an 11-week study of PACER/CM/ECF. The result is a monumental leap forward in the effort to fix the PACER problem. Finally, we have some details about what's happening with this vital resource. A few notes…
First, if you're in the legal, technology, or government space, you should read this thing. From technology to contracting to how PACER/CM/ECF works, we've never seen so many best practices in one place. Dip this document in bronze so it'll last forever: free.law/pdf/pacer-path…
Now, some highlights (but go read it!). First, the bottom line: "The judiciary should build a new system."
"There is the potential for many cybersecurity vulnerabilities."
CM/ECF is in maintenance mode and has been for two years. The backlog has 15,000 requirements and bug fixes.
Delivering a new feature take "years and requires work by hundreds of people." 🤯
There was a partial outage over the weekend that took down "almost 100 court systems."
It takes years of experience for admins to become comfortable with their version of CM/ECF due to the number of customizations and local modifications.
There are thousands of customizations a court can make to their installation of CM/ECF/PACER.
One representative module of CM/ECF consists of 1,100 perl scripts and it's so complex they can't really touch it anymore.
We can go on like this all day — The document is a marvel. But the bottom line is that a new system must be built and the sooner the better. The current one was great for its time, but is now a complete disaster waiting to either fall apart or explode into pieces.
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