Court E-Filing Distribution With Sealed Documents and Accessibility
Marion County Superior Court is deploying an electronic distribution service for 5,000 pages of filings per day. About 12 percent of filings are sealed or contain protected personal data, and the court must redact before public release. The public access portal allows search and download, but 30 percent of users are on mobile devices and some need screen-reader-accessible PDFs. Attorneys also request email copies, but the court's email gateway rejects messages over 25 MB. The clerk's office currently prints bench copies for 18 judges and distributes them by internal mail. The court wants to reduce printing by 40 percent while preserving a complete audit trail of who viewed or downloaded each document. The project lead must define output formats, distribution channels, and redaction verification.
1. Specify the output formats and accessibility requirements for public distribution. What would you reject?
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Publish a PDF/A-2b or PDF/UA-conformant file for each filing, with an OCR text layer and tagged structure for headings, lists, and tables. For scanned documents, run OCR and verify reading order; do not rely on untagged image-only PDFs. Provide HTML5 search results with a text snippet and a download link. For mobile users, serve a responsive viewer and cap initial download size. For screen-reader users, ensure the document title, language, and alternative text for images are present. Reject PDFs that flatten redactions into black rectangles without removing underlying text, because that leaks sealed content. Reject email distribution of sealed or protected filings; use portal authentication with role-based access. Reject image-only TIFFs for public access because they are not accessible and inflate bandwidth. Keep the archival image separate from the public-access derivative; the derivative should be redacted, flattened, and OCR'd, while the original is retained under court rules.
2. How would you handle attorney requests for email copies when the gateway rejects messages over 25 MB?
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Do not raise the gateway limit for all mail; that creates a data-loss and security risk. Instead, send a notification email with a secure, expiring link to the document set in the portal. The link should require authentication, be scoped to the recipient, and log the download. If the attorney needs an offline copy, offer a compressed PDF bundle split into parts under 20 MB, but only for public filings; sealed or protected filings never go by email. For bench copies, replace internal mail with a judge-specific portal folder and a daily print-on-demand job only for judges who opt in. Set a rule that any message containing a sealed filing is blocked at the mail gateway and logged. This reduces printing by giving judges and attorneys a controlled digital path while preserving the audit trail of who received what.
3. What redaction verification and audit controls would you require before a document becomes public?
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Require redaction on a copy, never on the archival original. After redaction, flatten the page to an image or remove the underlying text layer, then run a verification tool that searches for the sealed terms, names, and identifiers in the output. A human reviewer checks 100 percent of sealed filings and 10 percent of protected-personal-data filings. Log the reviewer, time, rule applied, and the hash of the redacted output. The public portal must show only the verified derivative; the original remains access-controlled. Audit every view and download with user ID, role, timestamp, and IP, and retain logs for the court's records retention period. Add a post-publication spot check and a takedown procedure if a leak is found. Do not accept a visual-only check, because black boxes over text are a common and serious failure.