LEADING THE PRESENT
L Responding to the Pandemic’s ‘New Normal’ Pandemic Rapid Response Team comes through for courts again
eading up to the 2020 presidential election, Circuit Judge Jennifer Bailey recalls following news on U.S. Postal Service issues affecting the delivery of mail-in ballots. But she didn’t think about how these issues impacted the delivery of court notices until she watched an NCSC Tiny Chat video.
“This just hadn’t occurred to me,” said Judge Bailey, the administrative judge of the Civil Division of the 11th Judicial Circuit Court of Florida in Miami. “After I watched the Tiny Chat, I shared it with the court community in Miami — not just my court — and it hadn’t occurred to anyone else either. This allowed us to prepare so we could counteract whatever disruption might occur.” Highlighting the impact of U.S. mail delays on the courts is one of many examples of how NCSC and the Pandemic Rapid Response Team (RRT) provided “crucial information to court leaders as it was needed” in 2021, according to Judge Bailey. “The RRT has been able to research and deliver immediate solutions to the problems we were facing,” she added. “The simplicity of the solutions — Tiny Chats, webinars, newsletter articles — has been remarkable.” Judge Bailey, a judge since 2002, said the pandemic has challenged the courts in a myriad of ways, but the challenges can be distilled into two areas: “Anything you were doing in person and anything you were doing on paper.” She said one of the most impactful lessons learned from dealing with the pandemic is how courts used Zoom and other video technology platforms to transition from inperson hearings to remote hearings.
Learn more about NCSC’s pandemic response 6
ncsc.org/pandemic
N AT I O N A L C E N T E R F O R S TAT E C O U R T S
“Before the pandemic, there was a huge resistance to remote appearances,” she said. “I would tell my colleagues, ‘You have to allow attorneys to appear remotely,’ but many of them didn’t want to. Now we have 143 judges working on the Zoom platform, and what we’ve found is that the judges who expressed the most resistance pre-pandemic are the biggest converts (to