There is quite a bit of a business opportunity in there (at least in theory as it a slimy red tape mess) for small and agile teams to come in and clean up the crap left by the large botched up jobs like these.

What it looks like to me is the usual scenario in decentralized organizations. Different pieces adopted systems as the need for them arose, and various systems were layered on top over that over the years to try and achieve some uniformity in certain areas.

What often happens behind the scenes is that requirements are written to a specific software product that is already effectively pre-determined. Like let's say it is a complicated inventory tracking system, out of 50 or so requirement points, every one basically matching the system that L3 provides without naming L3. Stuff like that.

It is vital to do behind the scenes networking, hiring insiders, that needs to happen besides also having someone full time that knows how to jump through the "official" red tape.

I don't think the government means to lock out small vendors. It's just that bureaucracy tends to generate bloated and inefficient systems like this, in which the only part of the contract the vendor can afford to skimp on is the implementation itself (and not the lawyers, negotiators, managers, etc.) The people who work for the government want good, working systems, they're just prevented from choosing vendors who can produce them because using common sense is not sufficiently bureaucratic.

http://www.thinkcomputer.com/corporate/whitepapers/restassur...

In addition to the two or three people you need to actually do the work, you need a head count of at least 6 more just to manage customer expectations.

And you are right, meeting, trade shows, filling out red tape, security audits all those need full time position to be handled.

I would imagine each court has no incentive to play nice with other courts, since it would basically simplify the process for challenging their judgments. Also, a higher court can basically use the court-to-court impedance barrier as a low-level filter to reduce their workloads.

It has not been upgraded since then, largely because Congress has not provided sufficient funds to the courts for them to do so (appropriations in the past two decades have largely been reserved for operations or for courtroom construction, but not technological upgrades. Much of the money from PACER access fees goes toward meeting the shortful in the operation budget, because Congress in its infinite wisdom has underfunded the federal courts for most of the last two decades.

(It's wierd that I have spent most of the last two days defending the American court system...)

Increase the fees that Lexis-Nexis pays. Or charge more to submit documents. There's lots of solutions that could work to create a site that's usable and free to the American people.

This blame Congress crap has gone on long enough. When will the U.S. court system take its responsibility to the American people seriously? The answer: when people like you stop parroting its rationale.

The US Courts are underfunded and have crippling case loads. Beyond that, is it even clear that any court has the authority to "increase the fees that Lexis-Nexis pays"? Or to charge more to submit documents?

He's making the same argument the U.S. court system has made, sub-rosa, for years, as it's raised fees for accessing court documents. It used to be 8 cents a page. Jumped to 10 cents earlier this year.

What about the $65,000,000 surplus that the service generates?

I'd imagine the system could be drastically improved using a tiny fraction of that income. (Of course it could only get worse if they spent $65M on it...)