Comment by ccleve | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ccleve | Hacker News Reader

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The Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts is obviously incompetent to carry out this work. Anyone who demands nine years to do this shouldn't be taken seriously.

All documents should simply be dumped into a common repository. S3 would do fine. Define some standards for common document metadata so each document is identified by case, author, type, etc. Enable S3 version histories.

Then create an API for creating cases and uploading documents. This will require some controls, logins, security, and some facility for billing users for filing fees. If the court just provides an API, they can stop there.

Private companies who want to provide a user interface to lawyers and the public can do so. I'm sure that more than a few will make searches and document downloads free.

And that's it. If the government would just get out of the way, this could be done in six months to a year and would be very, very cheap.

>And that's it. If the government would just get out of the way, this could be done in six months to a year and would be very, very cheap.

Absolute nonsense. People continiously underestimate the scale in which external facing government offerings are.

> This will require some controls, logins, security, and some facility for billing users for filing fees

Some? It's a very serious business with a lot of rules to implement.

> If the government would just get out of the way, this could be done in six months to a year and would be very, very cheap.

Based on what?

Based on my 40 years of experience as a software developer.

Look at it then as a developer in the real world: I doubt 40 years taught you to give estimates for systems you've never seen, for needs you know nothing about, for clients and users you know nothing about. My guess is that much more often, like everyone else in our industry, you deal with clueless people on the outside who say, 'why should that take so long? it's simple!'.

20 of my 40 years has involved managing and searching document repositories of various flavors. Prior to that, many of my clients were law firms. And yes, I have built more than one legal document repository.

>> systems you've never seen, for needs you know nothing about, for clients and users you know nothing about.

Perhaps you should make fewer assumptions about what I know.

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