 You're watching FJTN, the Federal Judicial Television Network. Coming up on Court to Court. The most challenging are when some people tend to get argumentative. By one estimate there are more than 62,000 computer viruses. Some are more dangerous than others. People know that things are going to change and the better we can prepare them for the types of changes that are going to occur, the more easily they will adapt to those changes. This is Court to Court. Your connection to what's happening in the federal courts around the country, providing information and ideas that will enhance your job and how the courts function. Now with today's program, Michael Birney. Welcome to Court to Court, the Federal Judicial Center's educational magazine program for all court employees. On today's show we'll learn what one court does to assist pro se litigants. We'll find out the difference between virus and bug, and we'll listen in as a group of court staff. Imagine the future. Kirk's offices often devote a great deal of time to individuals who file in court without the assistance of attorneys. Some courts approach this challenge by developing self-help materials for these pro se litigants. In this segment, our focus is on pro se litigants who are not incarcerated and whatever problems they may have, their immediate problem is not having a lawyer. We went to the district court for the district of Arizona to learn what it does. Do you want your, are you going to file on your own behalf? Yes. Without paying the filing fee? There are a lot of people who for whatever reason, whether they don't want lawyers or whether they can't afford lawyers, who have very serious grievances and who need access to the federal courts. And our job is to provide it and to do the best job that we possibly can for those people because our business is serving the public. But do you have a pending case on Superior Court already? Yes, ma'am. You want to initiate a new action in our court? No ma'am, I just want to, there are things that have been going on for six years and there's just federal laws and different things that have been violated and I would just like them to be reviewed. I'm not even sure if I'm in the right place but it's been helpful and I'm going to try it. We give them an example to follow, a format to follow and getting across to them that it's not a form that they fill out, it's a format that they follow is probably the hardest thing to communicate with them. We don't have a form for your actual complaint because nobody's complaining the same, they may talk to you or whatever but you will use blank paper and follow these instructions. You will get the case number at the time that you file it. Before they see a judge or before they see anyone else in the system they'll interact with our staff in the clerk's office at the customer services counter. It used to be called the intake counter. We now call it the customer service counter and we also call the employees at work there customer service clerks. While the different name helps make clear how the clerk's office views its function Weir says that what's most important is having knowledgeable and professional staff. The most important thing that I stress with the customer service clerks is that they have to greet the customer with open friendliness. I think this makes all the difference in your interaction with this customer if they're upset or confrontational. Cindy Duka is in charge of the clerk's office quality assurance program. The other thing to remember is put yourself in that customer's position. Treat them the way you would hope to be treated if you were in a similar circumstance. Right. Whether you can proceed IFP or if you have to pay the filing fee. What's IFP? What does that mean? That's a form of purpose what you're doing. You're asking, this is the motion. Like indigent of something? Right. Right. And you answer these questions and then we determine them now. What if I'm not indigent? How much is it just filed? It's $150. Okay. So what if I just come and bring the $150 and I file it? Okay. She was very helpful. She just kind of walking me through the different filing procedures and what it'll take to accomplish what I need to get done. We have a set series of steps that we try to go through with them. But it also is ad-lib because lots of times as you're going through like our little checklist of what we cover with them, they have questions. So we have to stop and clarify those questions for them as we're going. It depends on the judge, his calendar, what's going on. Now, does the court here review like the Joint General or state mandated cases a question? Another reoccurring problem is they often are under the impression that the court will immediately appoint them an attorney to assist them. And that's not necessarily true. The clerk's office gives all prose filers a packet of information to assist them. It's available in English and Spanish. We've done a one-page handout that explains to prose's how they calculate time to file or to answer in federal court. We've made available lists of legal organizations that provide free legal services. To increase the accessibility of the prose information, it's also available on the court's website. Many of the prose claims filed in Arizona are employment lawsuits. Very errors began his case several years ago. I need a little help, please. I need to file a prose of second motion for reconsideration. Okay. Here's my two copies. Okay, do we have a written on which we're going to file? Right, right. And that was the way I understand it too. I had legal counsel and ran out of money and so had to go prose. And then the process was just a matter of doing it and kind of OJT on the job training. You know, we have to have original plus one. The original goes in your file, the copy goes to the judge. Right, that's the original and that's a copy of that. They were very, very helpful and friendly. Operations analyst Cindy Duca says that the court is always looking for ways to improve service. We have customer comment cards that the customers can fill out and put in a locked box. And we also, as part of our quality assurance program, send prose filers a questionnaire asking about their visit. And we encourage their feedback and suggestions for better service. Ares had more success than many prose litigants. His case went to trial. It was exhilarating. The judge was gracious. I got chastised more than once. And so the defense counsels... They are all unique in their own way. So you just have to listen to what they have to say and not have made up in your mind that this is the same as the last one I had and treat each as an individual and be patient with them. And how does a court develop a staff that will do this? I think you do it from the very beginning. When we hire employees, that's a characteristic that we look for and people that we hire. We want people with good interpersonal skills. General training is on-the-job training. That's the most effective to actually experience it. When we have a new employee, we will talk about general situations that happen every day. But for this specific subject, we talk about how the prose say customer may be feeling. After his case was tried, Ayres thought several key issues had been overlooked. So he filed an appeal. They were good. They put up with me. I made a nuisance of myself sometimes until I figured out... And I tried to... I'm a good listener, believe it or not. So I listened to what they said and I would always had a pad and I would write it down. But sometimes there are some questions that come up that you really can't find the answer to. And that gets a little frustrating. The most challenging are when some people tend to get argumentative. If they have a customer who is pretty insistent that they want this information, they usually will call a second employee over to the counter to give their answer. And generally, if the customer hears the same answer from two employees, they'll accept it. But no matter what you do, some people don't accept the rules. What happened was that he became very impatient with everyone he spoke to in the clerk's office. He was using inappropriate language. He was belligerent and mistreated the people in the clerk's office. The clerk's office issued a memorandum outlining conditions for this man's contact with the court. These included being accompanied by a court security officer. But he continued to be abusive both in person and on the telephone. Although access to the court is a fundamental right, where a prosailitigant has become abusive and historically abusive, an injunction can be issued by the court. Finally, Judge Silver had the man appear in court to show cause why she shouldn't impose sanctions on him. Because dealing with difficult customers may ultimately involve testimony, Judge Silver has specific advice for clerk's office staff. Keep a record. That means maintain notes. And we're appropriate if the court allows it to also tape record conversations. That's going to be rare, but at least maintain copious notes of your contact with the abusive litigant. She encourages staff to seek guidance from the judge in such situations. In this particular case, Judge Silver ordered that the man's contact could be only in writing and that for any future matters he would have to be accompanied by court security officers. Many other courts give prosailitigants prepared information to help them with a complaint. Chief Judge Schroeder has been working to try out a number of ways to help courts and the prosaifilers. We are experimenting in some of our courts with mediation units using volunteer lawyers to come in and help mediate some of these cases. For clerk's office staff, knowing what they can legally say or do is only part of the effort. Usually all people want is for you to listen to what they have to say. And once you listen to their story, most of the time they are willing to go along with, okay, now this is what you need to get your case moving through the court and they accept that. In a future program, we'll return to this topic with a segment focusing on bankruptcy courts. The FJC has a package program titled, is it legal advice to help clerk's office staff provide service to all customers? If you're interested, please call 202-502-4134. Still ahead on Court to Court, we'll learn what some medical terms have to do with computers and we'll hear how thinking about the future can affect court staff education. Now watch this. I'm an evaluation form. You've surely seen me before. Well, I'm part of your materials and I perform a vital chore. The information in me helps the center to take stock. It helps them make their programs work to help you do your job. Please fill me in. We need this information. Please fill me in. We need to know the score. Please fill me in. Your feedback is important. And if you don't complete this form, we'll sing this song again. Your feedback is important. Please fill in the evaluation form available in your program materials or online on the DCN. Over the years, many words have taken on new meanings. Perhaps we're most familiar with slang terms that mean anything but their original definition. Bad, square, cool, tight, the bomb. The realm of technology has also given us many new meanings. Here with a couple of them is my colleague Bob Vagan. They caused the common cold, the flu, and more serious disease. But now, viruses also cause computer illnesses. A computer virus is a program that's designed to copy itself into other programs stored in a computer. The virus infects programs by modifying them or their environment, causing the programs to operate erratically, or corrupting a computer's memory. Some common problems viruses create are slower operation, decreased memory, and reformatting a hard drive. Technically speaking, a virus is a program or a section of programming code designed to destroy data or halt operation on systems. Viruses don't spontaneously generate. They're written by someone for a specific purpose, a virus's malignant software that attempts to affect your computer without your permission. Viruses can be transmitted to computer systems or individual computers through email attachments, internet downloads, or floppy disks and CDs. Some viruses take effect immediately while others remain dormant until specific circumstances start their code running. By one estimate there are more than 62,000 computer viruses. Some are more dangerous than others. One virus that affected many court units in the fall of 2001 was the NIMDA virus. NIMDA, which is admin spell backwards, spread quickly because it had several means of propagation, including email, network file sharing, and web downloads. As the NIMDA virus sought out vulnerable servers, it clogged the court unit's local area network, LAN, with unnecessary traffic, causing very slow user response. A couple of virus variations are Worm and Trojan Horse. A worm is a virus that overtly spreads through external network connections. A Trojan Horse is a program that pretends to have useful or desirable features, but actually contains a damaging payload. A Trojan Horse is not technically a virus since it doesn't reproduce itself. Protection against viruses is ever expanding. The courts use antivirus software to scan for viruses. While this software is invaluable, the precaution against opening attachments from unknown sources is still valid, especially executable files in the form of attachments that end in the file extension .exe. In other words, keep in mind the adage your mother always told you and our prescription. Don't take candy from strangers. If you experience or suspect computer-related security breaches, report them to your IT staff. They, in turn, will contact the Judiciary Automated Systems Incident Response Capability Group, more easily called JCERC. The technical staff there monitor such incidents and assist with particularly pernicious problems. The acronym JCERC is also their email address in Lotus Notes. Our other word for today is bug. We could go a lot of places with this one, from insects to annoying someone, to eavesdropping, even more illnesses. But we're still talking about computers. A bug is similar to a virus, and that it also relates to a coding problem. But with bugs, there's no malicious intent as with a virus. A bug is an unintentional coding error in a computer program. This accidental error occurs most often when new programs are being written. To debug a program, a programmer must scan through multiple lines of code to find the error, and then substitute corrected code for that which is malfunctioning. Bugs can occur in computer hardware too. Detecting a hardware bug is the same as with a software bug. It appears as a malfunction in a program. When a bug occurs in hardware, rather than software, new circuits have to be designed. A circuit is a path between two or more points, along which an electrical current is carried. Using the term bug to refer to flaws in mechanical systems has been around since the 1800s, but folklore has it that using bug to describe computer problems originated about 50 years ago with Grace Hopper at Harvard University. She traced an error in the Mark II computer to a moth trapped in a relay. The bug was carefully removed and taped to a daily logbook. Hopper, who also created the cobalt computer language, went on to become an admiral in the U.S. Navy. Regardless of the word used, it's obvious that technology has never been without glitches. Perhaps that's a term for another edition of Words to Know. In February, Chief Justice William Rehnquist announced that the Federal Judicial Center's board, which he chairs, selected U.S. District Judge Barbara Rothstein of Seattle as the ninth director of the Federal Judicial Center. Judge Rothstein succeeds Judge Fern Smith, who will return to the U.S. District Court in the Northern District of California after four years as director. Judge Rothstein was appointed a U.S. District Judge for the Western District of Washington in 1980. She served as chief judge from 1987 to 1994. Judge Rothstein will take up her duties at the Center in early September. The FJC recently held a conference to discuss emerging trends within the federal courts and changes in the world beyond the courts that might affect them. The focus was to identify how possible developments would translate to education and training for all court employees. Participants at the conference included leaders from all types of court units and a member of the Judicial Conference Committee's Long Range Planning Subcommittee. Discussion leader Peter Bishop engaged participants in a variety of imaginative exercises about possible big picture scenarios. The purpose, obviously, is, as I said, not to predict the future, but to explore in somewhat interesting ways, fun ways, of course, what some of the futures that you're facing, issues of physical place versus cyber place, issues of easy access versus traditional precedent, issues of judges versus staff, issues of central versus de-central. All of those things are uncertainties that could drive the future one way or the other. Bishop, chair of the graduate program in studies of the future at the University of Houston, emphasizes that it's futures studies. The misconception is that you have to be able to predict the future accurately and in the long term that is nearly, if not completely, impossible. And as a result, we talk in scenarios or possible futures, meaning that it is plausible that certain things might happen and even if they don't, it will have been good to consider them. Decision support software. Will the software make the decision for the judge or will the judge use the decision support software to make decisions? So the tension of physical and virtual, the other tension is how much is routine and the machine can do that and how much is non-routine. Where does the human have to be but lets the machine do the bulk of the work and therefore much fewer people and more technology and less human capital? You tend to have some pretty entrenched ideas about the way the court operates and probably about how the court will continue to operate. This experience I think derails some of that conventional thinking and that's helpful. There are so many scenarios that no one could have imagined. Obviously, September 11th is the one we all think about but that's not the only one. Changing to electronic case filing is going to be a revolutionary change for the judiciary. Participants quickly gave voice to some big topics. Smaller budgets, more technology, security concerns and more diversity. In the Ninth Circuit, we've always been big believers in long-range planning and we found it to be very helpful in terms of coping with crises, both immediate and pending. From the discussion, these court leaders thought several trends would be most important. These included the impact of an aging workforce, hiring and keeping a changing, more diverse workforce. Coupled with more diverse customers, this means additional education about managing diversity and being sensitive to it. For managers and executives, the participants see the need for more process improvement training and also training and planning and managing information technology. Another key area will be more staff training to assist pro se litigants. The impact of science and technology will play a big part in future staff education, especially as geographic boundaries become less apparent. Well, every plan assumes a certain future to be successful. If those assumptions are quite narrow, then the chance that the plan will not work is high. Therefore, we like people to challenge their assumptions to say, well, what if this other thing happens or what if this third thing happens and develop a plan that is robust enough to handle significant changes in the future? Because the change is going to happen no matter what. And this has helped us to understand that we have to be better prepared for what possible changes there may be. That everything is possible and not to reject something because it seems so improbable. Transformational change begins with messages from the future saying, hey folks, change is coming, we should place this as a priority. Only then do plans and actions follow as a result. Where should you be making change over the long run rather than just carrying out the business of the operations that your task to do? Well, it forces you to undermine some of the critical assumptions that we all make every day about how we operate and how we'll operate five years from now. And how is that going to change the way the court functions? How is it going to affect the values that the court tries to embrace? Oh, I think that opens up some super opportunities for training staff because it makes us think outside the box. It gives the staff an opportunity to make suggestions for training. Instead of us taking a look at the existing programs and trying to fit this into those models, maybe we can create new models. In my court, the whole idea of CMECF is going to be here. It's going to done it. Now we have some electronic evidentiary techniques and filing in the future is going to be all electronic. We're no longer going to have groupie boards that you're showing to the juries. It's all going to be popped up on the screen and be in DVDs and that's how it's going to be transmitted to the appellate court. I think it helps us target what type of skill sets our employees in the future will need and to start developing programs to meet those needs. People know that things are going to change and the better we can prepare them for the types of changes that are going to occur, the more easily they will adapt to those changes and I think the more efficient they'll be in terms of their work. Okay, so we want to know what the present is and what the future is probably. Greater centralization has budgetary resources go down. More concern with security. Okay. Both physical and security for court records. Okay. And then the relationship of courts to the community at large. I think the most important thing that I've learned is the idea of plausible alternatives as opposed to coming up with a plan and using that as the only direction to go and to look at plausible alternative things that could occur to throw you off track from your plan and plan how to adjust and cope with those types of changes. I think the issue of autonomy of the courts that we currently enjoy, the court units, we thought that we might see much more scrutiny. Judge Kessler believes the implications for education are far-reaching. I think that the judiciary has to do some long-range thinking about its role in a democratic system, about the need for it to educate the public about its role so as to build more support for its continuation and more respect for its independence. And that really is an educational process because when the public realizes what we have to do, they understand the necessity for independence. By the end of the conference, Chief Prohibition Officer Jill Benoit was ready to take an upbeat message back to her office. To let my staff know that there's a lot of people working on solutions, a lot of people working on answers for the future, and we have common concerns that we're not alone in this battle. We're interested in your thoughts and reactions to the future of court staff education. We hope you'll fill out an evaluation of today's program. You can find it at our website at the address on the screen. There's a section for you to tell us what you think the big issues will be in court education. We also want your ideas about other topics we should cover. Click on FJC Broadcast on the FJTN, and then click on Court to Court to select the evaluation form. There are two forms. One can be printed, filled out, and mailed or faxed to us. The other can be completed online. Both invite your ideas for future topics. Please join us for our next program, which will feature one court's public outreach with a monthly cultural series, and another court's success with telecommuting. A moment in court history returns with another trial for treason. This one is the former Vice President of the United States. I'm Michael Burney, on behalf of everyone at the Federal Judicial Center. Thank you for watching today.