Justice System Software by RCP Software
Welcome to the world of RCP Software justice system software for judges, lawyers,
court administrators, law enforcement, prisons, and others associated with the
judicial system. This site will feature prototype (demonstration) software, most of
which will be FREE. Just download and use it. The demonstrations will all start at
the Demonstrations Page. And please refer others in the legal system to this site so
they can also take advantage of this resource. We welcome suggestions, ideas, and
your thoughts for judicial system software! From time to time the demonstrations will
change. If there is something specific you want demonstrated, contact us.
Some of the demonstrations are going to involve software created for purposes
other than managing legal data. Some of the software will be demonstration
versions of software to show potential purchasers of the fully capable software,
created for purposes such as bowling data management, how the software will work
on their computer if they buy it. In conjunction with that, there will be discussions of
how the software works and how software constructed in such a manner could be
used beneficially in the judicial system. I am hoping that even those who have dug
themselves into defensive positions about overpriced and inept software created for
the courts will look at these demonstrations and learn.
The author of this Web site has also written freelance technology columns for the
Daily Recorder, the legal newspaper for the greater Sacramento County, California
area. You may read archived columns at DR Columns 1-40, DR Columns 41-80, DR
Columns 81-120, and DR Columns 121-160. The intention has been to educate the
justice system about what can be done with modern technology.
If any particular piece of demonstration software needs to be customized (e.g. each
county or lawyer needs a personalized version) the charge to customize it will be
extremely reasonable. Some customization will be free.
RCP Software extends a sincere invitation to all legal professionals and others
associated with the legal system, including law enforcement, probation, court
administrators (both local and state level), prison officials, secretaries, judges,
lawyers, clerks, etc. to describe their software needs and request help. In the case
of court administration software, if administrators from different counties would get
together and agree on items such as data fields and desired capabilities for a
particular type of software and bring that list of needs to me in plain English non-
technical language, software can be created that will operate in each county in a
common fashion and which will contain data commonly formatted so that it can be
easily exchanged between counties and even states. Court calendaring software
immediately came to mind when this series of demonstrations was original
contemplated. As will be described below and on other pages, it can come to far
more than that. Law enforcement agencies that need to exchange data can also be
helped and it doesn't need to cost a mint. Contact us now.
Prototypes (i.e. demonstration software) can be created quickly based on plain-
English descriptions by prospective users as to what they need. Such prospective
users will be able to try out such prototypes hands-on on my laptop computer and,
in some cases, on their own computers. All such demonstrations will be free.
While the creator of this software is a California attorney, the invitation is extended to
legal professionals, including court administrators, legislators, other elected officials,
and law enforcement in every state.
One of the aims of this demonstration portion of this Web site is to show the legal
profession, law enforcement, court administration, prison administration, our
Legislature, and the taxpaying public that supports the legal system with their
hard-earned tax dollars, the extent of what can be done for very small amounts of
money. It is also the intention of the author to demonstrate that excellent software
can be created quickly as well as inexpensively.
Those who have been ripping off unsuspecting legal professionals, law enforcement
agencies, court administrators, prison officials, the taxpayers, and technologically
ignorant politicians holding the purse strings by telling them this stuff is complicated
to create, takes years to create, and therefore must cost millions, hundreds of
millions, or even billions of dollars for court, prison, or law enforcement systems,
and hundreds or thousands for individuals, are not going to like this site. That's just
fine.
What is the magnitude of what can be done? It's probably beyond the current
comprehension of many in the justice system. But before being too hard on them,
keep in mind that most of them have little knowledge about computers and
particularly about how to write modern software. RCP Software has produced easy
to use and extremely powerful software for handling other types of data and has no
unhappy customers. Some who have purchased software for handling bowling data
have been absolutely ecstatic. My engineering tech friend about fell off his chair
when I produced complex calculation software that none of the engineers around
him could produce. No customer has ever found a single bug (code execution error)
in any RCP Software that has been released commercially. Contrast that to
California government-purchased software - for both welfare and court case data
management - that has been found to have thousands or even tens of thousands of
bugs.
Want to get a general idea of the scope of what is possible? Look first at this page
generally describing RCP Software. While those supporting the expenditure of
billions of dollars on a currently proposed system to handle simple case data for
California trial courts have tried to impress those without knowledge of how to write
modern software with the supposed complexity of the software and system required,
the truth is that court case data is not sophisticated or complex. It is no more
sophisticated than welfare data which is also not sophisticated or complex. Thus, a
system to handle either type of data could be put together very quickly. Want to see
complex? Take a look at the RCP SuperSingles-n-Doubles software that has
numerous advanced features, handles very complex mathematical/statistical data
sorting, has no bugs, and is easy to use. Look at the listed capacities and
capabilities carefully.
And also new for 2010, is a "hub" application - BowlerTracker - created at the
request of an RCP Software customer. It works with other bowling data
management software to track bowlers across multiple tournaments. The
combination is an example of modular interlocking software. The complexity of the
code required to power these two specialized applications makes the simple code
required for a justice data management system look like child's play.
So why won't your elected officials and court administrators look at what can be
done instead of considering pouring billions of your taxpayer dollars into exorbitantly
expensive projects backed by lobbying vendors who don't even know how to do this
stuff? For starters, you might want to call Hector De La Torre, chair of the California
Assembly Committee on Accountability & Administrative Review and ask him. Or ask
his vice-chair, Assemblywoman Audra Strickland. They know exactly who I am. Talk
to their staff person, Mark Martin, and ask him if they ever plan to DO anything or
just plan to have public hearings now and then to wail about how the AOC is
spending a lot of money on the California Court Case Management System (CCMS).
For a more detailed discussion of this foolish government IT project, go to the
government page.
To get started looking at demonstrations, click on any button above or any link that
lists a software program such as RCP CALCRIM demonstrated earlier or other
upcoming software. Currently featured items will be accessible from the
Demonstrations Page. If you like the software, use it and encourage your friends to
use it instead of letting them waste money on commercial software that doesn't even
work well. And in your role as a taxpayer, get all over any politician that supports
handing your hard-earned tax dollars over to any of the several vulture IT vendors
who have been siphoning off hundreds of millions of dollars from county and state
treasuries, and often for software that is just plain awful.
From time to time new items will be created and demonstrated.
So just how bad is the situation in the California court system and what can be
done? Well for starters, we could abandon the crazy CCMS project, which is based
on technology which was obsolete years ago, and start using modern technology.
The following functionality is all possible now and the functionality described below
is just the tip of the iceberg.
Software for handling general case management exists now and has a self-teaching
tutorial embedded in it. It can prepare calendars in seconds with 100% accuracy.
The legitimate cost to arm California judges with this technology and other
associated technology would average around $6,000 per judge, not $1 Million per
judge. For each county or court group (e.g. there are many such court groups in the
Los Angeles County system), the base setup cost paid to the vendor would run
around $100,000. Setting up additional courtrooms/judges would run about $5,000
each. A small to moderate sized county could be entirely set up for less than
$150,000.
California attorneys handling appointed criminal appeals might want to take a look
at CalAppealForms, a series of personalized templates to automate many
administrative tasks commonly encountered when handling criminal appeals under
appointment from a Court of Appeal or the California Supreme Court. The entire
series is available on CD-ROM for $150 plus tax. $162.38 total. I use these
templates every day in my criminal appellate work. To order, send your check
payable to Richard Power to the address shown on the contact page.
court administrators, law enforcement, prisons, and others associated with the
judicial system. This site will feature prototype (demonstration) software, most of
which will be FREE. Just download and use it. The demonstrations will all start at
the Demonstrations Page. And please refer others in the legal system to this site so
they can also take advantage of this resource. We welcome suggestions, ideas, and
your thoughts for judicial system software! From time to time the demonstrations will
change. If there is something specific you want demonstrated, contact us.
Some of the demonstrations are going to involve software created for purposes
other than managing legal data. Some of the software will be demonstration
versions of software to show potential purchasers of the fully capable software,
created for purposes such as bowling data management, how the software will work
on their computer if they buy it. In conjunction with that, there will be discussions of
how the software works and how software constructed in such a manner could be
used beneficially in the judicial system. I am hoping that even those who have dug
themselves into defensive positions about overpriced and inept software created for
the courts will look at these demonstrations and learn.
The author of this Web site has also written freelance technology columns for the
Daily Recorder, the legal newspaper for the greater Sacramento County, California
area. You may read archived columns at DR Columns 1-40, DR Columns 41-80, DR
Columns 81-120, and DR Columns 121-160. The intention has been to educate the
justice system about what can be done with modern technology.
If any particular piece of demonstration software needs to be customized (e.g. each
county or lawyer needs a personalized version) the charge to customize it will be
extremely reasonable. Some customization will be free.
RCP Software extends a sincere invitation to all legal professionals and others
associated with the legal system, including law enforcement, probation, court
administrators (both local and state level), prison officials, secretaries, judges,
lawyers, clerks, etc. to describe their software needs and request help. In the case
of court administration software, if administrators from different counties would get
together and agree on items such as data fields and desired capabilities for a
particular type of software and bring that list of needs to me in plain English non-
technical language, software can be created that will operate in each county in a
common fashion and which will contain data commonly formatted so that it can be
easily exchanged between counties and even states. Court calendaring software
immediately came to mind when this series of demonstrations was original
contemplated. As will be described below and on other pages, it can come to far
more than that. Law enforcement agencies that need to exchange data can also be
helped and it doesn't need to cost a mint. Contact us now.
Prototypes (i.e. demonstration software) can be created quickly based on plain-
English descriptions by prospective users as to what they need. Such prospective
users will be able to try out such prototypes hands-on on my laptop computer and,
in some cases, on their own computers. All such demonstrations will be free.
While the creator of this software is a California attorney, the invitation is extended to
legal professionals, including court administrators, legislators, other elected officials,
and law enforcement in every state.
One of the aims of this demonstration portion of this Web site is to show the legal
profession, law enforcement, court administration, prison administration, our
Legislature, and the taxpaying public that supports the legal system with their
hard-earned tax dollars, the extent of what can be done for very small amounts of
money. It is also the intention of the author to demonstrate that excellent software
can be created quickly as well as inexpensively.
Those who have been ripping off unsuspecting legal professionals, law enforcement
agencies, court administrators, prison officials, the taxpayers, and technologically
ignorant politicians holding the purse strings by telling them this stuff is complicated
to create, takes years to create, and therefore must cost millions, hundreds of
millions, or even billions of dollars for court, prison, or law enforcement systems,
and hundreds or thousands for individuals, are not going to like this site. That's just
fine.
What is the magnitude of what can be done? It's probably beyond the current
comprehension of many in the justice system. But before being too hard on them,
keep in mind that most of them have little knowledge about computers and
particularly about how to write modern software. RCP Software has produced easy
to use and extremely powerful software for handling other types of data and has no
unhappy customers. Some who have purchased software for handling bowling data
have been absolutely ecstatic. My engineering tech friend about fell off his chair
when I produced complex calculation software that none of the engineers around
him could produce. No customer has ever found a single bug (code execution error)
in any RCP Software that has been released commercially. Contrast that to
California government-purchased software - for both welfare and court case data
management - that has been found to have thousands or even tens of thousands of
bugs.
Want to get a general idea of the scope of what is possible? Look first at this page
generally describing RCP Software. While those supporting the expenditure of
billions of dollars on a currently proposed system to handle simple case data for
California trial courts have tried to impress those without knowledge of how to write
modern software with the supposed complexity of the software and system required,
the truth is that court case data is not sophisticated or complex. It is no more
sophisticated than welfare data which is also not sophisticated or complex. Thus, a
system to handle either type of data could be put together very quickly. Want to see
complex? Take a look at the RCP SuperSingles-n-Doubles software that has
numerous advanced features, handles very complex mathematical/statistical data
sorting, has no bugs, and is easy to use. Look at the listed capacities and
capabilities carefully.
And also new for 2010, is a "hub" application - BowlerTracker - created at the
request of an RCP Software customer. It works with other bowling data
management software to track bowlers across multiple tournaments. The
combination is an example of modular interlocking software. The complexity of the
code required to power these two specialized applications makes the simple code
required for a justice data management system look like child's play.
So why won't your elected officials and court administrators look at what can be
done instead of considering pouring billions of your taxpayer dollars into exorbitantly
expensive projects backed by lobbying vendors who don't even know how to do this
stuff? For starters, you might want to call Hector De La Torre, chair of the California
Assembly Committee on Accountability & Administrative Review and ask him. Or ask
his vice-chair, Assemblywoman Audra Strickland. They know exactly who I am. Talk
to their staff person, Mark Martin, and ask him if they ever plan to DO anything or
just plan to have public hearings now and then to wail about how the AOC is
spending a lot of money on the California Court Case Management System (CCMS).
For a more detailed discussion of this foolish government IT project, go to the
government page.
To get started looking at demonstrations, click on any button above or any link that
lists a software program such as RCP CALCRIM demonstrated earlier or other
upcoming software. Currently featured items will be accessible from the
Demonstrations Page. If you like the software, use it and encourage your friends to
use it instead of letting them waste money on commercial software that doesn't even
work well. And in your role as a taxpayer, get all over any politician that supports
handing your hard-earned tax dollars over to any of the several vulture IT vendors
who have been siphoning off hundreds of millions of dollars from county and state
treasuries, and often for software that is just plain awful.
From time to time new items will be created and demonstrated.
So just how bad is the situation in the California court system and what can be
done? Well for starters, we could abandon the crazy CCMS project, which is based
on technology which was obsolete years ago, and start using modern technology.
The following functionality is all possible now and the functionality described below
is just the tip of the iceberg.
- Any judge or clerk in any California superior court could pull up a modern
database stored right there in their courthouse on a server and quickly
determine the calendar for any courtroom for any date. Want to know what's
scheduled for next Tuesday? No problem. The data can be sorted by
courtroom and even by calendar time. Unlike the ancient CCMS technology
which, according to judges at Sacramento County Superior Court, makes
many mistakes, modern technology would allow quick isolation of all the
appropriate records with 100% accuracy. - Confidential records such as bank statements, psychiatric or other medical
records, CPS reports, staff attorney notes, probation reports, etc. can be
protected by 2-layer isolation technology and even further by encryption
where deemed necessary. - All pleadings and other documents can be filed in electronic form. Standard
forms can be fillable and can contain, where appropriate, automatic
calculations such as total unstayed sentences in criminal cases. The record
can be such that it could be supplied to an appellate court a hundred miles
away in less than a minute at virtually no cost. - Customized 28 line pleadings can be prepared by filers in a standard
format making all text and other data easily interchangeable. - Information such as tentative rulings can be prepared in a modern word
processing format and placed on the Web for public view with all formatting
intact. Such rulings could be prepared in any order, then quickly sorted by
docket number or case name, as desired, before being placed on the Web.
Such documents could easily be furnished to web viewers in Word (word
processing) format or Adobe Acrobat (image) format, or both. - Data can be exchanged with other agencies such as the state prison system
(CDCR). A court could quickly pull up CDCR records, general case data
records from other courts, and data from other state or county agencies.
The information could be current within a day or even within hours if the
associating agencies are willing to facilitate the process to that degree. - Searches of huge arrays of such pooled data can be accomplished as fast
as the user can hit the keyboard keys, quickly identifying the files containing
matching data. This can be accomplished with local servers costing less
than $10,000 each. - A district attorney's office or other agency handling lots of litigation could
electronically file a large block of cases for the day without anyone ever
leaving their office. The superior court clerk could assign docket numbers in
large blocks, notifying the clerks in the district attorney's office of the docket
number assignments in less than a minute. The district attorney's office
clerks could then enter the docket numbers into their system and into the
pleadings already prepared and file everything with the superior court clerk
electronically within minutes. - Attorneys could file pleadings from anywhere in the world that has Internet
access. - Agencies such as the district attorney's office, the public defender's office,
other county or state agencies, and even private counsel or the public could
at any time pull up the court database and determine what they had on
calendar for any date, courtroom, or time. It could be done from anywhere in
the world that has Internet access. - Records for appeals could be distributed electronically at virtually no cost to
reviewing courts, appellate attorneys, and others. - Jury instructions could be created in modular interlocking format, easily
exchangeable between the parties in tendered form and easily assembled
electronically by the court. They could be scrolled down a large courtroom
monitor as they are being read. They could be supplied to the jury on a
deliberation room computer instantly. They could be part of the electronic
trial court record. No paper need be involved. - Electronic records could contain digital images and digital audio and video
recordings. Expensive and time consuming appellate augmentation would
become a footnote in the history books. - Sealed records such as Marsden hearings could be encrypted and thus
contained in a trial record, with persons such as appellate counsel being
supplied a password later if authorized to view the document. It could all be
done electronically and thus a sealed document could be "supplied" to
someone hundreds of miles away in seconds.
Software for handling general case management exists now and has a self-teaching
tutorial embedded in it. It can prepare calendars in seconds with 100% accuracy.
The legitimate cost to arm California judges with this technology and other
associated technology would average around $6,000 per judge, not $1 Million per
judge. For each county or court group (e.g. there are many such court groups in the
Los Angeles County system), the base setup cost paid to the vendor would run
around $100,000. Setting up additional courtrooms/judges would run about $5,000
each. A small to moderate sized county could be entirely set up for less than
$150,000.
California attorneys handling appointed criminal appeals might want to take a look
at CalAppealForms, a series of personalized templates to automate many
administrative tasks commonly encountered when handling criminal appeals under
appointment from a Court of Appeal or the California Supreme Court. The entire
series is available on CD-ROM for $150 plus tax. $162.38 total. I use these
templates every day in my criminal appellate work. To order, send your check
payable to Richard Power to the address shown on the contact page.
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