Comment on DOD-2010-OS-0070-DRAFT-0001

Although this proposal will save travel and postal expenses, this proposal makes more work for military justice practitioners. It makes more onerous, not less, the task of administrative staff: more staff in every office devoted to scanning paper pleadings or printing electronic pleadings to compile a "complete record" reconciling the various media. Either the official record of trial here remains the paper record appended by electronic media, or paper copies are scanned and copied onto a CD-ROM; or, the official record becomes bifurcated, existing partly in paper and partly in electronic media. Servicemembers, judge advocates, and the public should enjoy the same system used by all US Courts and several other Article I courts: CM/ECF. That cloud-based "virtual court" would allow judge advocates and staff judge advocates, as well as Pentagon officials, CCA and CAAF judges, immediate and full access to the full contents of pleadings, bench rulings, and written rulings, at every stage of trial, from preferral, interlocutory appeal, SJAR, CAX, all the way to appellate pleadings and rulings. eROTs would be immediately available to judge advocates across the globe, and fully searchable. Moreover, CM/ECF provides all of the statistical and oversight capabilities of the aged and inaccurate database/ "bean counting" systems implemented individually by the services, which have no ability to communicate with each other. Rather than "bandaging" a 60 year old system via an inefficient and error-prone MS Outlook-based hybrid system, recommend this Court voice a plea to the CIO of DoD that DoD fully modernize military justice implementing the proven cloud-based CM/ECF "virtual court" system, and make it transparent to the public via PACER, in accord with OMB's recent Open Government Directive. The real solution is to migrate to a modern cloud-based virtual court--which requires far less manpower, minimal copying and scanning, and less equipment than a hybrid system.