 You're watching FJTN, the federal judicial television network. As the conversion to case management electronic case filing continues in courts across the country, each court's experience with training will be somewhat different. Yet there are similarities, and hearing from staff about their experiences can be a valuable tool as courts prepared to implement this new system. The FJC visited two courts that had recently gone live with CMECF, the bankruptcy court for the district of Wyoming and the district court for the district of Nebraska. As with any change this large, many factors affect staff training. The change to CMECF for me was a little scary. I felt my job was threatened. I didn't know if they would have a need for people anymore. We were kind of questioning whether or not we would be necessary under CMECF. So I think my initial reaction to CMECF was one of a little bit of apprehension and a little bit of fear. My first reaction was, oh, I have to learn something new again. Because when I was hired we were doing band cap, and I had to learn all of these really funny codes. It was kind of hard, but I did, and then I was going to have to learn something new. Learning something new affects even recently hired employees who are still in the midst of learning the old system. Fear of the unknown, switching from something that I was just learning, and then I'm going to have to now stop and learn something new. You can't emphasize enough that the system isn't going to replace what we're doing today. It's just going to change how we do it and the processes we do. There's plenty of work to do in the new system. It's just different work. The more information you can give the staff, be honest with them, be upfront with them. Go into some detail as to how the job will change as far as a case administrator goes in the future, and not just say that there will be work. You need to reinforce that with the quality control aspect of it, that even though things will go into the system on their own, somebody still has to look at it and see if it's correct. Probably contacting the attorneys more on the phone. We have docket clerks that are doing training for the attorneys, more outreach. Since implementation, I think the deputies have learned that their work has changed. What they do is changing, but there's plenty of work to do. Makes people do their job in a different way. The program that you work on, it's so much easier than what we have because there's no codes. You can just point and click, which is very easy. You don't have to memorize anything. I thought it would be so difficult, but it's not. It's very easy to maneuver. I am very excited about it because I hate ICMS. I really do. It's just a pain. ECF is better. The biggest surprise has been that it's a lot easier than Band Cap was. There are extra steps in doing what you have done before, but it's easier. It might take a little while longer, but there's nothing to be afraid of. It allows you to change things that you're going to input in before you finally submit it. I think it's wonderful. I think it's exciting. How'd they get to this attitude? Probably the training made the difference. I think you can't start early enough as far as basic window skills, learning how to use a browser, the mouse, how to work in the windows environment because that's new to a lot of the case administrators. Wyoming and Nebraska both did needs assessments to determine what else staff might have to learn in order to master CMECF. Email skills, PDF skills, there's all kinds of skills that get wrapped into this you may not think about. We found out that there were some weaknesses in some areas of WordPerfect, especially like file management, so we created a file management class in WordPerfect. None of our staff had ever seen PDF writer before, really dealt with PDF files that much, so we did a PDF class. I think the key to training staff is to start early, start as soon as you can and involve everyone in the process. And I think that what you need to do is do little teasers, have them go through some computer-based training, give them some challenges, just get them exposed to the software. To overcome the fear factor, the project leaders in Nebraska made a humorous video for the official start of their CMECF campaign. And we just wanted the staff to, you know, kind of relax and know that we were going to have fun. There's going to be bumps in the road, but we're going to have fun. They adopted a sports motif to create challenges for the staff. We had this Olympic theme going for the gold, and we had every staff member and chambers secretary on a team, and they finished these challenges. So they had to go in and open a case, they had to dock it in motion. Telling them what it looks like, let them talk to other courts, or if you talk to other courts, sharing that information with them, what other courts have experienced. We use the CBTs, or computer-based training modules, to get our staff familiar with the system, just to get out there and look around some more. Some people just kind of like to tinker when they have some extra time, and that's what they did. Just letting them get their hands on the system, even if it's another court's software, getting out there and touching it and getting a feel for it, I think you're going to not have as much anxiety on their part, because they've seen it now. It looks like there's something... We want our court to be on the cutting edge, i.e., cutting edge, but not bleeding edge. We were the second to the last to go on ICMS, and I'm very, very proud and thrilled to be the first court that will be going on criminal ECF. I think an important point to remember is that most of the people already know the process. It's just how you're applying it. You're applying it to a new system. The support aid, I thought, would go over our case closing events, and practice on closing some actual cases now. It's important when we're training to encourage the staff to always ask questions and not to accept things as they are just because they're there. The question is, how are we going to discharge? What do we show to discharge you? If they ask the question, there may be another way to do it, or it may be a process that we don't need to do anymore. The biggest surprise to me in converting to CMECF is how much easier some of our processes have become. What it will come back with is a listing of cases that CMECF believes are in a position to close. Clerk of court Joyce Harris decided it was easier to train in small increments rather than covering everything in one session. Some of our systems people did the training. Some of the training was done by the project manager. Some of the training was done by the case managers. So what we did as a system staff is we hovered and worked behind the people, helping them when they ran into small procedural problems where they got lost. Can I call right now? Can you highlight that in there? And it has been a stretch and a good stretch for me as a systems person to learn how the docketing fits into what we're doing because I can't really solve any of the problems that have come up for the case managers unless I understand how they do their business and how they docket. And so communication among all of the people, among your systems people, your chief deputies, your program managers, the docket clerks, everybody to a greater or lesser degree has to be in on this. Based on its experience of beginning training about nine months before going live, the Wyoming court recommends not starting too early. I would suggest that the training not occur until about three months before you went live. In our case, I think we were a little bit ahead of that. And you start to lose the skills if you haven't put them to use pretty soon. Divisional offices create issues too, says Pat Merritt, deputy in charge of Nebraska's divisional office in Lincoln, where all eight staff needed CMECF training. Staffing's an issue. Staffing is absolutely an issue. If you have a divisional office of eight people, you have training scheduled and everybody's involved in electronic case filing, someone has to stay back. What we did try to do was we had two sessions offered in Omaha and two sessions offered in our Lincoln office. And we structured that so that half the staff could attend one day, half the other, and they could also go to the other location if needed. When the criminal complaint comes in, the first thing we need to do is open up our magistrate case in CMECF. We just made sure that everyone got there. If it meant someone from Omaha coming and covering a courtroom or something, so a courtroom deputy could attend training. We created several sessions and had the staff sign up for what was convenient for them. A session lasted about two days, two full days. And then in that session, we basically took a case. It was at one of our actual court cases and docketed that entire case in CMECF. So everyone got the overall feel of the system, what it was going to be to open a case, how it was going to be to close the case. And I think that made the most sense to people to see that overall picture. So this we're opening as a magistrate case, so we're going to do MJ. I thought it was very good, very thorough. It gave everybody an opportunity to bring out their thoughts and views on things. We have two trainers in the room, one person who sits at the PC and drives, and the other person is kind of like a floor walker. They're walking around making notes of maybe questions that we need to go back and find the answers to, helping those in the class that needed a little extra help. Be prepared to spend a lot of your time wondering what you're doing at first. And then one day you'll sit down, it will click. And then you'll say, this is the easiest thing I think I've ever done, because it is. Now this is different than in civil. In civil we didn't care, but in criminal it does matter, and it's going to make a difference whether or not they get their email notification. It does not take the place of you knowing your job, but it makes knowing your job so much easier. They're going to have to have a little bit of flexibility because there's going to be a lot of changes involved. And I think the sooner that you realize I have to take an active part in learning, all I can about CMECF, the better off you're going to be. In a small office it's difficult to work the training in as well as do the day-to-day work. The deputies in this district just made it happen. We tried to fit it in within an eight hour day as best we could, but oftentimes the days were longer. Some departments may have had to work weekends, evenings. We just had to get more time. It just had to be done. We managed our workload at the time of training by working extra hours, or coming in earlier, staying late. We made the choice of how long we wanted to do that. Everyone just worked together as a team, and we got things done. I don't think it could have been done a better way. I think everybody realized that we were in training. We had our work to do and we needed to be trained. Things are not going to be as normal. Normal isn't existing anymore. We have a new normal. You'd go to training. You'd be in training all day long. You'd come back from training at four o'clock or something. There would be a huge stack of work left for you to do. And you can't get upset with your coworkers because, guess what? They have a huge stack of work that they are trying to get done, too, because they've been just as busy. And they've been doing their best, and they're trying to help you out, but it doesn't always happen that way. And you get behind. You very quietly had a conception, if you had to, but you did it quietly. Other times, hopefully, other people in your team can pick up the slack, but it's been very difficult for everybody involved. Sometimes it's so hard when you see the workload on your desk to think training is not important, especially when ECF might be six months down the road. It's hard to grasp that that's the priority at the time. You just stay a little bit later each night. I'm not a morning person, so you're not going to see me in the office at six o'clock. I'll rather stay till six in the evening than come in at six. What we had to do was ask staff to come in on the weekends and work some overtime. You hate to do that, but what we really had to. I was okay with it because I felt like I needed to be in those meetings and I needed to understand what was going on. Our judges have been extremely supportive. There are days that we get behind three or four days. Our judges have not complained once. So without their support, we wouldn't be able to do it. Wyoming Bankruptcy Court case administrator Geraldine Huber makes a clear distinction between training and going live. No, I think the training was fine. It's just that it's training. We were allowed to go in there and play and open cases, docket things in a case. And that was still playing, but when you go real, it's real. There has to come a point in time when you say, I'm as ready as I'm ever going to be and we'll deal with the problems once they come up and let's just do it. Case administrator Charlene Severson has down-to-earth advice for the actual switch day. Just relax. Be ready and have a good breakfast, good night's sleep. And it just happens. Well, just pay attention to what you're doing. I think the first 30 days were pretty hectic. At least they were for us. We've caught up with our workload. And now the hope is that we will have extra time in the day that we can go up to the training room and do, you know, perhaps weekly training on issues that are coming up as we're working along. Severson says that ongoing training is often informal. We'll just meet by the front intake or have a stand-up meeting. We'll talk something over and make a decision and that will be what we go with. When you get done here, I have a question for you on an order. OK. We could look it up on CMECF. OK. And it doesn't make any difference if it's just a little tiny item or something great big. I learn something new every day. I think that keeps your mind active and open to learning. In Nebraska, when the district court went live with CMECF for civil cases, the clerk's office began weekly debriefing meetings, video conferencing with the Lincoln office. Could we compromise, put it in a case folder, but not, but just write the case number on there? Would it be more difficult just to put it in a folder, you know, like a criminal folder? I really thought that they would taper off. And, you know, we've been on this project now three months, and we still meet once a week. And our list constantly has 20 items on it. And those really are training, because all the docket clerks come to the debriefing meetings. And any issues that come up, we talk about there and we work them through. We have a computer right there. So if somebody has a question about something, we can just go on the computer, show them how it works. We've been opening up the statistical civil cases for 2255 motions on ECF. And there was a little bit of confusion on which remark we should be using, whether it was the remark non-public or the remark public. The video conferencing debriefing meetings are totally invaluable. They are the best. And it's shared information. We wouldn't be able to have that if we were doing it by even speakerphone. So it just has opened up the door completely. It's marvelous. They've been one tool that we've used that has been probably, I think, the most effective communication tool we've had since we've been on CMECF. Everybody gets a chance to talk about those things. And you have a chance to put in your input. If we go to the trouble of making these files and putting them in there, they're not going to be complete anyways. That's really the good part about it, is you're in this loop with everybody else of knowledge and sharing your ideas and stuff. And you don't feel like you're sitting on the outside waiting for somebody to come along and tell you, well, we decided this. Well, this is what's going to happen now. You're part of it. You're part of making the decisions. And you're part of reviewing if the decisions don't work or if they work out really, really well. There's always minutes from those meetings and for people that aren't able to attend and to deal with the constant changes. I think one of the most amazing things to me is the changes. The decisions we made on day one changed on day three. We try it out. We see how well it's going to work. And if it doesn't work out so great, then we get together again the next week and we say, you know what, this didn't work. So let's try something else. Let's think of something else to do. Chief Deputy Clerk Denise Lux says the next step in training is to deal with topics for which they initially didn't have time. For instance, we need to go back. We need to do appeals training. We need to work with the eighth circuit and decide how we're going to handle our appeals. We need to do more training on quality control. They have not been trained on the editor functions of CME-CF. They have not been trained on answering help desk calls from attorneys. And so those are ongoing training classes that we're gonna have to create. Not all of my PDF files are showing on the screen. Do I need to do something differently? Even if you don't know when your court's gonna go on CME-CF, start learning everything you can about it as soon as possible. And start talking to other people about other courts, about what they've done, what they've seen. Someone has gone before you. They've thought through all the issues that you're currently addressing. And we would not be where we are today without our mentor court. They got help from the district court in a neighboring state. The Western District of Missouri stepped up to the plate. They took us on and we were probably a pain for them. In the midst of its own conversion, the Nebraska court became a mentor court for the district of Kansas. But we feel that we owe that back to the program. And the value to us is that it's a new perspective. District of Kansas is already coming up with new ideas, new ways to outreach to their attorneys, to their staff. And so we learn from them as well. Wyoming is a large state. There's a lot of square miles out there. The bar does not have access to the court like they would have in a large city. Our intent is to bring the case trustees on first. And they're a small group in our district. So we're hoping to have them come on site to the district. And we'll get them trained. However, it may be such a thing that we'll need to go to their office and train them. We also have a video conference facility in the court that can tie into our state university system that enables us to reach almost every town in Wyoming. So a mix of all those things I'm sure will be used to train the attorneys. I think all of us are willing to put in the time, whatever it takes to get what they need. That's our job. We're here to serve the bench, the bar, and the public. And by doing what we're doing, we're educating them to use the tools that we will have available. For every trustee, we get a mountain of paperwork every year. And if we can get them trained and get them on the system, it will be worth that initial outlay. I'm looking forward to opening it to the outside world, to the trustees and the bar. The work that the attorneys or the trustees submit, we will still be looking at it. We will do quality control on it. Evidently, they are still investigating this one. We haven't had the notice yet from the trustee. We'll still have a lot of work to do, I'm sure. But that'll be exciting too, because I like to correct other people's mistakes. I hate to make mistakes of my own and I make plenty of them, but I like to correct other people's. In Nebraska, the need to train outside users has led to some pleasant surprises. I've always known we've had a great staff and they're very talented and very hardworking. But what has happened is we've discovered a lot of hidden talent. They're thinking of new processes, writing new procedures, coming up with new ways to do things. And it's really just a different outlook on their jobs. And we had several of our staff members that volunteered to help with attorney training. And those staff members went through a separate training for that. I initially volunteered to be a trainer because I figured that to be a trainer, I would have to know what I was doing. It's been great. When you're a trainer, everybody wants to get that information to you right away because they know that you're gonna be telling other people how to do things. We don't have any more attorneys for the USA. We're done with this. So we're gonna go ahead and click the submit button. And so for them, that was probably one of the best trainings they could get was to have to take what they had learned and teach it to somebody else and train those attorneys. I love the attorney training aspect. I think it's such a positive experience. I mean, when in ECF, other than ECF, do you get to work with attorneys on a new project that your court's undertaking? And it's been a good marvelous learning experience for me. I think the key to training attorneys is to have some patience and be willing to be a good listener because they have some frustrations or they may have some concerns. And I think if you're not willing to listen to those concerns, then the communication kind of stops there. The scope of training doesn't stop with the bar. Everybody who ever touches a case file needs to know something about CME-CF. So that's not only just your docket clerks, but your courtroom deputies. You have people in your admin staff that look up cases from time to time, all of your chamber staff. The marshal's office needs to be able to pull up a case. When you get into the criminal side, you've got your probation and pretrial offices. So just within the court, I'm now training the entire court. It's our project and they need to know how to access cases. So it's really our responsibility to give them that training. An example of training's payoff came for docketing supervisor Jennifer Stone when she helped chamber staff use CME-CF to access the documents in a case that had been transferred from another jurisdiction. Anything that had been filed in that case while it was in their jurisdiction. So that was amazing. And I think that I know my for myself is like, wow, this is really cool. So that was a good thing. That kind of success doesn't come without hard work. The biggest surprise for me in converting to CME-CF is the amount of time we've invested in the project. And I knew it was going to be a lot of time and staff time and resources. But I think that I didn't understand to what extent it was going to be. It has basically consumed my job. I have been doing nothing but CME-CF training, preparing materials, scheduling training, talking to attorneys about training, talking to the staff about training. Nothing but training for at least the past six months. I think I've dealt with that becoming my full-time job by looking at some of the other people in the office that I can use as resources. I didn't personally know how much time it was going to take and how much energy it was going to take. But would we do it all over again? Absolutely. It is the future. It's where we need to go. And it's fun being on the cutting edge and it requires a lot of time and energy from our staff. But all of us are just keeping a very positive attitude and have tried to do things for our staff to bring them through the change process on a positive note. Energy is an interesting thing. It becomes very infectious, but it's got to start at the top. And our management team is very energetic and very enthusiastic about the project. And you start to see that sprinkle through your agency and through the court. Because it's great. I mean, yesterday I got an email from an attorney and posed a question. We have a little ECF help email. And I responded to the question. And his response was, this is so cool. There are also big payoffs for the hard work of training in the office that still has the first bankruptcy case ever filed in Wyoming. It's exciting for me especially because having been here for 31 years, I've seen it all. And when I started, we did everything with a mimeograph machine and we didn't have electric typewriters. So to be able to see what we are able to produce and give to the public now is just really overwhelming at times. Now I think it's great. I think it's required our court to go...