Continuity, Accessibility, and the Infrastructure Courts Actually Need
A Cives Court Infrastructure Reflection
Abstract
This article examines what court administrators actually need in order to preserve the rule of law as the operational environment around courts changes faster than the institutions themselves were designed to move. It starts from a brief observation about where the broader field already stands, then turns to the three pressures the National Association for Court Management named as the frame for its 2026 Annual Conference — the expansion of artificial intelligence into court operations, an evolving cyber and physical threat environment, and a shifting social atmosphere testing public trust in judicial institutions — and asks what each will actually require of court infrastructure over the next several years. It argues that continuity, accessibility, transparency, and clear AI and data governance are no longer aspirational values but load-bearing requirements of modern judicial administration, and closes with a practical framework court administrators can apply when evaluating whether their current technology is equal to this moment.
1. A Theme Chosen with Intention
This week, court administrators, clerks, and judicial leaders from across the United States gather in Jacksonville for the National Association for Court Management’s 2026 Annual Conference. NACM chose to frame this year’s conference around a deliberately weighty theme: preserving the rule of law and judicial independence amid rapid, simultaneous change — the expansion of artificial intelligence into court operations, an evolving cyber and physical threat environment, and a shifting social atmosphere in which the legitimacy of judicial institutions is tested in new and public ways.
The three pressures NACM has named are not, on inspection, three separate problems. They are three expressions of a single underlying reality: courts are being asked to remain open, fair, and functioning under conditions of disruption that are more frequent, more varied, and less predictable than the conditions their buildings, staffing models, and procedural rules were designed around. Preserving the rule of law under these conditions is not primarily a question of adopting new technology for its own sake. It is a question of whether the infrastructure a court relies on can absorb disruption without absorbing due process along with it.
This article takes each of the three pressures NACM has named and asks what it will actually require of courts going forward, in concrete operational terms rather than as conference framing.
2. A Starting Point: What the Broader Field Already Knows
Court administration is a comparative discipline by necessity. No single jurisdiction has solved every challenge, and much of what courts learn, they learn by watching how other institutions have handled the same underlying problems under different legal traditions, caseloads, and budgets. Cives has had a close view of that exchange: our infrastructure is in daily use inside courts on more than one continent, and we have sponsored international gatherings of court administrators where this kind of comparison is the entire point of the room.
A small number of themes recur wherever that conversation happens, and they are worth stating plainly before this article turns to the more immediate questions Jacksonville has put on the table this month. Court systems are increasingly organized around multiple pathways to resolution — litigation, mediation, conciliation, and administrative processes offered through a single institutional framework rather than forcing every dispute through the same channel. Court culture, from physical space to interface design to procedural friction, is increasingly understood to either reinforce or ease the burden on people who often arrive at a courthouse carrying real hardship, whether or not that hardship is visible. Transparency is increasingly treated as something an institution has to keep demonstrating through accessible, checkable process, not something it can declare once and move on from. None of this is exotic to anyone who works in court administration. It simply frames what follows.
3. What NACM 2026 Names, and What Comes Next
Naming a pressure in a conference program is the easy part. The harder question — and the one this article is actually interested in — is what each of NACM’s three named pressures will concretely require of court administrators and their technology over the next several budget cycles, not just this week in Jacksonville.
3.1 AI in Court Operations: From Pilot to Governance
Artificial intelligence has moved past the pilot-program stage in court operations. Transcription, translation, document triage, scheduling optimization, and drafting assistance are already in production use in various court systems, and that footprint will only grow. The question administrators will increasingly face is not whether to use AI, but how to govern it once it is embedded in workflows that carry due-process weight.
Governance, in concrete terms, means being able to answer a small set of questions for any AI-assisted function: which outputs are AI-generated versus human-authored; what human review sits over each function before it affects a case; how a litigant would contest a decision or document influenced by an AI system; and how that governance is documented well enough to survive an appeal, an audit, or a public records request. Courts that treat this as a procurement afterthought will find themselves explaining AI use after the fact, under scrutiny, rather than by design.
3.2 The Threat Environment: Continuity as a Designed Capability
NACM’s framing of an “evolving threat environment — both cyber and physical” — is not a rhetorical flourish. It describes a category of risk that court administrators increasingly manage as a routine operational matter rather than a rare contingency: severe weather, cybersecurity incidents, facility security events, public health emergencies, and simple service outages, any of which can interrupt a hearing calendar that does not reschedule itself without cost to litigants, victims, witnesses, and public confidence.
This logic is increasingly codified into law rather than left to institutional discretion. California’s Senate Bill 707, for example, requires eligible legislative bodies to adopt, in open session, a written policy specifying how the body will respond to service disruptions during a public meeting — including a mandatory minimum recess period before proceedings may resume. Whatever the differences between a legislative meeting and a courtroom hearing, the underlying requirement is the same, and it is likely to spread: continuity of public process during disruption is being treated less as institutional preference and more as a baseline, increasingly statutory, obligation.
The practical implication for the next several years is that continuity capability will likely move from something courts describe after an incident to something they are expected to test and document in advance — closer to how other critical public infrastructure already treats disaster recovery. For an administrator, the uncomfortable but necessary question is this: if the network connection into a courtroom fails tomorrow morning, does the hearing recess into a documented, tested procedure — or does it depend on whichever staff member happens to be present improvising a solution in real time?
3.3 A Changing Social Atmosphere: Trust as Infrastructure, Not Sentiment
The third pressure NACM named is the hardest to operationalize, because public trust in institutions is not a line item. But it is not purely a communications problem either. When proceedings are visible, accessible, and checkable — when a certified recording exists, when captioning and interpretation are available by default rather than by request, when a member of the public can actually follow what happened and why — institutions demonstrate legitimacy through the process itself rather than asserting it afterward. When those things are absent or inconsistent, no amount of public messaging fully substitutes for it.
Over the next several years, courts that treat visible, auditable process as core infrastructure — built into how a hearing is conducted, not added on for high-profile cases — will be better positioned to maintain legitimacy under scrutiny than courts that treat transparency as a feature to switch on when it is politically convenient.
4. Accessibility as Rule-of-Law Infrastructure, Not Compliance Overhead
Courts occupy a uniquely constitutive role in democratic society: they are the institutions through which the abstract rights of citizens are given concrete effect. When court technology is inaccessible — whether because a hearing platform lacks screen reader compatibility, requires a cognitive test to authenticate, or fails minimum color contrast requirements — the gap between formal legal rights and their practical exercise widens precisely for the litigants, witnesses, and jurors least able to absorb that cost.
The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, now in their 2.2 revision, and the U.S. Department of Justice’s 2024 rule implementing Title II of the Americans with Disabilities Act have converged on WCAG 2.1 Level AA as the enforceable technical floor for state and local government digital services, with compliance deadlines extended through an Interim Final Rule to April 2027 for larger jurisdictions and April 2028 for smaller ones. Crucially, that rule makes clear that a government entity cannot discharge its accessibility obligations simply by outsourcing a digital service to a vendor who does not itself meet the standard — the obligation travels with the service, not the org chart.
A courthouse that offers several pathways to resolution has not actually expanded access if any one of those pathways — the video hearing, the e-filing portal, the virtual mediation session — is inaccessible to a litigant with a disability. Each pathway has to be one everyone can actually use, or expanded access simply relocates the exclusion rather than eliminating it.
5. Evidence Over Aspiration: The QICDRC Record
Institutional claims about hybrid hearing readiness are easy to make and hard to verify. The more useful question for a court administrator evaluating any platform — Cives included — is not what a vendor asserts, but what an independent judicial institution has actually reported after deploying it in daily operation.
The Qatar International Court and Dispute Resolution Centre (QICDRC), Qatar’s civil and commercial court and regulatory tribunal, integrated Cives’ Courts solution (Courts for Webex) into its eCourt system for day-to-day virtual and hybrid hearings. In its own 2024 Annual Review, QICDRC reported holding its largest-ever number of hearings that year, describing its handling of hybrid sessions — with some participants physically present in the courtroom and others joining remotely from abroad — as having gone exceptionally well. That adoption sits within Qatar’s National Digital Agenda 2030 and supports a judiciary comprising eighteen judges drawn from eleven jurisdictions, a composition that makes reliable, high-quality hybrid participation a structural necessity rather than a convenience.
What makes the QICDRC record useful to an American court administrator considering NACM’s 2026 theme is precisely that it is not a projection. It is a documented operational outcome, reported by the institution itself, describing what happened when hybrid infrastructure was asked to carry a full judicial caseload rather than a pilot program.
6. What Court Administrators Should Ask of Their Technology
The themes above point toward a consistent, practical set of questions any court administrator can put to a current or prospective hearing platform — questions that matter regardless of jurisdiction, caseload, or budget:
Continuity: Does the platform have a documented, tested procedure for what happens to an in-progress hearing when connectivity fails — or does continuity depend on staff improvisation?
Role separation: Can the system distinguish, structurally, between a judge conducting a hearing and a judge facilitating mediation or early neutral evaluation on the same matter — or does that separation depend on manual process?
Accessibility: Is the platform independently conformant with WCAG 2.2 Level AA today, or does it depend on future remediation to meet the DOJ’s 2027–2028 compliance deadlines?
Auditability: Does certified recording and streaming exist as a built-in institutional record, or as a bolt-on feature dependent on a separate vendor relationship?
Multi-pathway support: Can the same platform support litigation, mediation, conciliation, and administrative case management — or does each pathway require a different tool, with the fragmentation that implies for litigants and staff alike?
Multilingual and disability access: Are real-time captioning and interpretation native to the hearing experience, or dependent on a separately procured service that may not be available for every session?
Data sovereignty: Where does the recording, transcript, and case data created during a hearing actually reside, under which jurisdiction's legal authority, and can that location be matched to state records-retention law, CJIS requirements, or a foreign court's own data-residency rules — or does the platform's cloud architecture dictate the answer regardless of what the court needs?
AI governance: Where a platform uses AI — for transcription, translation, triage, or drafting assistance — is it clear to administrators, judges, and the public which functions are AI-assisted, what human review sits over them, and how a litigant would contest an AI-influenced outcome? A platform that cannot answer this clearly is not ready to carry NACM's first named pressure, whatever else it does well.
None of these questions are exotic. They are the operational translation of pressures every court system is already navigating in one form or another: that resilience, accessibility, transparency, and data governance are not features to be added to a general-purpose meeting tool, but requirements to be designed in from the architecture up. Nor is this list exhaustive — procurement teams will have jurisdiction-specific questions of their own — but a platform that cannot answer these eight clearly has not yet earned a place on a court’s docket.
7. Looking Ahead: Infrastructure, Not Aspiration
NACM’s choice to frame its 2026 conference around America’s 250th anniversary and the preservation of the rule of law is a reminder that judicial independence and public trust are not self-sustaining. They depend on institutions — and increasingly, on the infrastructure those institutions rely on — remaining functional, fair, and accessible even when the environment around them is not cooperating.
Over the next several years, the courts that navigate AI, threat, and shifting public trust most successfully will likely be the ones that stopped treating hearing infrastructure as a commodity choice years before they had to. Continuity, accessibility, auditability, and AI governance are easier to design in from the start than to retrofit under scrutiny, and the jurisdictions that build that discipline now will simply have fewer hard conversations later.
Cives was built on the conviction, encoded in its own name — the Latin plural of citizen — that every person who depends on a public institution is entitled to the same quality of access, regardless of language, disability, geography, or the nature of the disruption the institution happens to be facing that day. Courts are, of all public institutions, the ones where that conviction carries the highest stakes: it is where the abstract promise of equal justice either becomes real for a specific person on a specific day, or does not. We intend to keep contributing to the conversation NACM has convened this week, for as long as courts continue asking what it actually takes to remain open, fair, and trusted.