When is our court computer system coming back online? There hasn’t been a lot of media coverage on the problem with Odyssey or JABS being down or what the effect will be if the problem continues. The Administrative Office of the Courts (AOC) posted last week that there was “unauthorized activity” on the system, and they took steps to “secure critical systems.” So does this mean that AOC strategically took the system offline to prevent further possible damage to the network? It doesn’t appear that the issue with the system was similar to the “denial of service” attack on the Pennsylvania court system earlier this year. Whatever the cause, the outage hinders the courts and lawyers in their ability to function in our modern court system.  Jury trials have been delayed by a month in some counties (such as Okanogan), although trials in most jurisdictions appear to be proceeding, including Spokane. If the court computers are down for too much longer, our criminal legal system risks developing another backlog similar to what happened during the recent public health emergency. In addition to delayed legal proceedings, a security breach creates a risk of personal data being leaked. The Kansas court system suffered an issue where private information of more than 150,000 people was released.

Criminal defense lawyers in our state use courts.wa.gov for accessing standard court forms and copies of recent pleadings. One recent client had his case dismissed and he wasn’t able to produce a copy for his employer. In another case I was involved in, I was unable to retrieve a court order in a major felony case. The clerk and prosecuting attorney couldn’t access it either. The only person who could locate the order was the defendant who had a hard copy. The client texted me a copy of the order and I resubmitted it to the clerk. Over the last 10 years many attorneys have gone “paperless.” This is a challenge when computer system collapse. Old school lawyers who have maintained paper files have felt vindicated.

Attacks on court computers seem to be increasing throughout the USA. The reasons behind each attack is unknown, but it may be that hostile forces are trying to undercut confidence in our judicial institutions. In this country when court systems are compromised, the public often doesn’t ever get a full explanation for what went wrong or what occurred. After a similar problem with the court system in Los Angeles, the LA Times took the court system to task for its opacity and called for a public investigation. The editorial board stated that they felt the court’s limited funding and culture of independence may have led the court to cut itself off from the rest of the county’s security systems.