GSU s Colleges of Law and Business partnered to complete the project. We choose electronic court filing because the application seemed natural in view of the College of Law s participation. Very quickly, we realized that the creation of an electronic court filing system required the resolution of multiple issues beyond the use or non-use of digital signatures. One of the more significant issues is the document format issue. As a result, courts and lawyers need to standardize on a common document format in order to efficiently pass documents between multiple law offices and courthouses.
Courts are similar.
At present, it appears that many courts will require the filing of PDF documents, since this will obviate the need to mandate a particular version of MS Word or Word Perfect. PDF, of course, is not an elegant means of passing information. The prospect of an industry-accepted Legal XML standard is much more elegant. Over the past year and a half the GSU project has advocated the creation and use of industry-standard legal SGML or XML DTDs. In November 1998, GSU began hosting the Legal XML Workgroup on a university listserve.