December 29, 2011
Dear Members and Others:
The Alliance of California Judges is pleased that our judicial branch leaders have abandoned the misguided effort to fund with private dollars the troubled California Case Management System. From the beginning, this potential funding scheme lacked transparency having been the subject of a surprise announcement during the October Judicial Council meeting. We later learned that ongoing discussions between high ranking AOC bureaucrats and the supposed “benefactor/philanthropist” had been in the works for at least a year. Just as troubling to the Alliance and others was the obvious potential for conflicts of interest and the protection of confidential personal records that are filed in many cases. We are gratified that it took less than the allotted twelve weeks of “due diligence”to arrive at the obvious conclusion that this was not an appropriate course of action.
This aborted public/private venture underscores the need for greater scrutiny of how our branch leaders are making decisions about our limited public resources. Continuing to fund the discredited CCMS at the expense of fully functioning local trial courts should not be allowed to continue. That is one of the reasons the Alliance continues to support AB 1208 which will help to restore some semblance of reason and balance to the judicial branch.
What follows is today’s AOC press release (jcw – pdf omitted) together with today’s excellent story from the Courthouse News Service titled “After Singing Praise of Private Investor, Judicial Administrators Beat Hasty Retreat”.
Thank you for your support.
Directors,
Alliance of California Judges
_____________________________________________
AOC NEWS RELEASE 12/29/11
CCMS ‘Due Diligence’ Talks Suspended
Judicial Council committee, Foundation, State Bar shelve exploratory talks
SAN FRANCISO—The Chan Soon-Shiong Family Foundation Board and the Executive and Planning Committee of the Judicial Council, stating that a collaborative relationship on the early deployment of the California Case Management System (CCMS) was more complex than anticipated—particularly with the Foundation’s desire to target problems in the foster care system—voted yesterday in separate actions to endorse a recommendation to suspend talks designed to explore the potential use of grant money and other resources for the early deployment of CCMS. The recommendation was a mutual decision by the Chan Soon-Shiong Foundation, the State Bar of California, and the CCMS Internal Committee, the Judicial Council committee overseeing the CCMS project.
In December, the three parties began a 12-week due diligence period to more fully explore the viability of the collaborative approach.
“Our interest in supporting CCMS emanated from our observation of the tragic state of the foster child system in California and the opportunity for CCMS to play a significant role in reducing placements in abusive homes,” said Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong, Chairman of the Chan Soon-Shiong Family Foundation. “The Chan Soon-Shiong Family Foundation is committed to the health and welfare of our community, and our interest in supporting CCMS in terms of data exchange is in the system’s ability to provide a digital alert to the child welfare agency whenever a person involved in a foster care case shows activity in the courts overall system involving child abuse, drug abuse, and other criminal activity. Unfortunately, other aspects of the system are much more complex than we initially understood and will require much more sustainable resources outside of philanthropy,” he said.
“It also became clear to us in the due diligence phase that a collaborative relationship would be more complex than anticipated, particularly with the Foundation’s overarching desire to target problems in the foster care system,” said Ronald G. Overholt, Interim Administrative Director.
The Foundation expressed that it may remain interested in working with the Judicial Council to deploy CCMS in ways that would protect foster children in California to guarantee that foster home placements do not expose children to unsafe elements.
“The proposed collaborative approach was a great out-of-the-box solution to a public sector funding challenge,” said State Bar President Jon Streeter.
Executive Director Joseph Dunn said, “It was agreed long ago that the judicial branch would maintain exclusive ownership of CCMS as well as continue to maintain control of the source code, security and access to data pursuant to policies established by the branch.”
Funding for the CCMS project was reduced to $14 million for the fiscal year 2011-2012 during an emergency budget session last July. At that time, the Judicial Council approved a transfer of $56.4 million from CCMS to the Trial Court Trust Fund in order to lessen the impact of the $320 million reduction to the trial courts.
Douglas P. Miller, the chair of the council’s Executive and Planning Committee, which sets the agenda for Judicial Council meetings, said the Council must ratify the recommendation at its next meeting on January 24th. He said a fuller discussion about CCMS will occur later in the year. “Our internal committee is awaiting a comprehensive, independent financial and deployment analysis from Grant Thornton, a national auditing and consulting firm already familiar with the project. We hope to get that report by March.”
Related articles
- After singing praise of CCMS deal court leaders beat hasty retreat. (Maria Dizneo, Courthouse News)
Judicial Council Watcher 
unionman575
December 31, 2011
Right on ACJ!
Wendy Darling
January 4, 2012
From The Recorder, the on-line publication of Cal Law:
S.F. Court Is Four Months Behind on Mailed Filings
Cynthia Foster
Court CEO T. Michael Yuen acknowledges processing has “taken a hit” from layoffs.
Full article requires subscription access: http://www.law.com/jsp/ca/PubArticleCA.jsp?id=1202537271521&SF_Court_Is_Four_Months_Behind_on_Mailed_Filings&slreturn=1
Long live the ACJ.
Wendy Darling
January 4, 2012
Published today, Wednesday, January 4, from Courthouse News Service, by Maria Dinzeo:
Marin Case Related to Big Court IT Project Gets Go Ahead From Judge
By MARIA DINZEO
SAN FRANCISCO (CN) — A federal judge has ruled that Marin County can go forward with a fraud case over software made by a German company that was installed by Deloitte Consulting, the same consultant now developing software for California’s courts.
Marin says payroll software from German company SAP was defective and Deloitte bungled the $11 million installation. The result, says the county, was a software mess that put the county in worse shape than it had been with its antiquated payroll system.
“The county was saddled with a costly computer system far worse than the legacy systems it was intended to replace,” says the complaint.
Separately, Deloitte is developing case management software for California’s courts in a project that makes the Marin deal look tiny. Court administrators have already spent $500 million on Deloitte-made software that contains more lines of code than a Boeing airliner and is expected to cost the public another $1.4 billion.
Read the full article: http://www.courthousenews.com/2012/01/04/42754.htm
Long live the ACJ.
unionman575
January 25, 2012
http://www.courthousenews.com/2012/01/25/43346.htm
Wednesday, January 25, 2012Last Update: 5:26 PM PT
Controversial Court IT System Pushed for Ten More Courts
By MARIA DINZEO
SAN FRANCISCO (CN) — Despite recent setbacks, judges on the the governing council for California’s courts announced Tuesday they are pushing ahead with plans to install a controversial IT system in ten more local courts.
They said accounting firm Grant Thornton will be asked to prepare a cost-benefit study on installing the IT system in 22 trial courts, with that list culled down to ten based on local interest and need.
California’s courts are currently trying to maintain operations in the shadow of a proposed state budget that may cut their funds further, on top of draconian cutbacks over the last three years. The IT system, called the Court Case Management System, has already cost a half-billion dollars and is projected to cost almost $2 billion by the time it’s in place.
A separate source of funding for the IT project was offered by a pharmaceutical mogul last fall, but negotiations on the offer fell apart recently.
Judge James Herman of Santa Barbara told the council Tuesday, “There were more complications than were anticipated.”
In an interview, Justice Terence Bruiniers said, “If we had outside money and resources for deployment, unquestionably it would have been easier.”
He added that the judiciary’s precarious budget situation has delayed work on the IT system, which is currently only used in a handful of courts. But spending any more money on the project, regardless of the source, does not sit well with many of California’s trial judges.
“As California local courts struggle to keep their doors open, the Judicial Council continues to spend close to a million dollars a week on the mismanaged and publicly maligned CCMS project,” said Sacramento Judge Maryanne Gilliard, a critic of the council’s spending priorities.
“What started out as a $250 million dollar system has morphed into a $1.9 billion dollar fiasco,” she added. “Asking the Governor and the Legislature to spare the courts from further budget cuts while continuing to waste precious resources on CCMS is a wrong headed strategy.”
Despite the opposition, central administrators for the courts are plowing ahead with installation in a few more courts, in Fresno and San Luis Obispo County.
For Presiding Judge Barry LaBarbera in San Luis Obispo, the IT system cannot come soon enough. “We currently have no case management system at all,” he said.
“The immediate benefit for our community is 24/7 access to calendaring information and minute orders,” he said. “Parties can access information which can tell them when pleadings are filed by the other side.”
“We expect to go live some time in 2013 in the Fall.” LaBarbera added that his court has had to hire temporary staff to do the jobs of permanent employees who are busy working on CCMS, and he hopes to see cost-savings once the system is installed.
In his interview, Bruiniers was quick to say that there are no current plans to install the IT system beyond Fresno and San Luis Obispo.
“These are things we have to do in any event,” Bruiniers said in reference to the Grant-Thornton study. “Whether now or later it has to be done.”
He said the lack of a cost-benefit analysis was one problem the Bureau of State Auditors identified in a report on CCMS last year. “It was one of the things the BSA criticized before so we want to make sure we have all that information.”
“Grant Thornton is not looking at just cost of deploying there, but beyond what would make sense as the next step — which courts are interested in doing it, where is the most need and where do we get the best return on investment,” he said.
But in Sacramento, Gilliard said a group of trial judges critical of the court leadership will oppose any more spending for a project she describes as a “disaster.”
“The Alliance of California Judges opposes any more raids on trial court funds to prop up this disaster,” she said. “We call on our branch leaders to reverse course……. don’t force local Presiding Judges to beg for more money when funds from CCMS are available to keep our courts open and don’t expect the Governor and Legislature to ignore your spending priorities.”
Bruiniers could not list all of the courts participating in the analysis, but mentioned courts like Ventura, Orange County and San Diego who already have an interim version of CCMS, as well as newcomers like Santa Cruz, Santa Clara, and Alameda, “who have expressed interest in implementing one or more modules.”
Bruiniers said Los Angeles is also on the list.
But Los Angeles judges have been among the foremost critics of what they describe as a cumbersome and labor-intensive IT system with an enormous price tag. “Money is getting drained off on projects that everybody but the Administrative Office of the Courts agrees are misguided,” said Los Angeles Robert Dukes in an interview earlier this month.
A reporter’s request on Wednesday for the full list of 22 courts considered in the Grant-Thornton study was handed by the spokesman for the Administrative Office of the Courts over to the public information office as a public records request, a process that often takes weeks or months. The same procedure was applied to a question about the cost of the Grant-Thornton study.
In his interview, Bruiniers pointed out that the entire judicial branch budget remains uncertain, with a deeper cut of $125 million likely if voters reject Gov. Jerry Brown’s proposed tax hikes on sales and high-incomes, on the ballot in November.
“We’ve had very little certainty in our budget,” said Bruiniers. “We need to know how much money we have before we can talk about how to allocate it.”
Judicial Council Watcher
January 25, 2012
The great irony here about that last statement from Bruniers is that they’re already allocating the 50 million dollar trial court increase to CCMS by suggesting they push it off on other courts.
There is one aspect that Maria Dinzeo has repeated that is incorrect.
CCMS V4 is a complete rewrite of CCMS. While 1,2 & 3 were based on the same software platforms and constructs, CCMS V4 is for the most part an entirely new program and that entirely new program does not function in a single court.