LegalXML Electronic Court Filing Standard

In trying to answer my own question about how the Federal Court of Australia could set standards for exchanging information electronically, I came across the OASIS LegalXML Electronic Court Filing Technical Committee. They have a 55 page LegalXML Electronic Court Filing, working draft (V 4.0, March 17, 2008):

This document defines the LegalXML Electronic Court Filing 4.0 (ECF 4.0) specification, which consists of a set of non-proprietary XML and Web services specifications, along with clarifying explanations and amendments to those specifications, that have been added for the purpose of promoting interoperability among electronic court filing vendors and systems. ECF Version 4.0 is a major release and brings the specification into conformance with the National Information Exchange Model (NIEM) 2.0.

This is accompanied by 1Mbyte of XML definitions of the transactions and metadata. This is much too complicated for what the federal court has in mind, but some of the definitions and techniques may be of use. Also this is not a consensus draft and the committee may be a long way from having a final document, if ever.

The standard includes:

CoreFilingMessage

xsd/message/ECF-4.0-CoreFilingMessage.xsd

CivilCase

xsd/casetype/ECF-4.0-CivilCase.xsd

It also removes some ambiguity over date formats:

• Calendar date values should be expressed as “CCYY-MM-DD”, with an optional time zone qualifier designated by appending -hh:00, where hh represent the number of hours the local time zone is behind Coordinated Universal Time (UTC).

• Time values should be expressed as “hh:mm:ss.sss”, with an optional time zone qualifier designated by appending -hh:00, where hh represent the number of hours the local time zone is behind Coordinated Universal Time (UTC).

There is also a useful diagram describing the "Filing Preparation to Docketing Process Model".