Field Note #1 - The Justice Translator Role: Why Alignment Fails Before Technology Does

Justice technology projects rarely fail because the software required cannot be built. They fail because people believe they are aligned when they are not.

Judges, clerks, court administrators, IT staff, vendors, and consultants often use the same words to mean very different things. For example: “Disposition.” “Calendar.” “Close the case.” “Docketed.” "Proceeding." "Workflow."

Each term carries legal, procedural, and operational meaning that varies not only by state, but by court structure, division, and local practice, including even by courtroom and prior professional experience of the main actors. When these differences are not surfaced deliberately, implementations proceed on partial understanding — and the gaps only become visible during testing or after go-live.

The Justice Translator role exists to prevent that failure mode.

A translator is not a project manager, a subject-matter expert, or a technical architect. The translator’s responsibility is to continuously reconcile meaning, assumptions, and ownership across legal, operational, and technical domains. This includes translating justice reality into implementable logic — and translating technical constraints back into operational implications that court leaders can evaluate and decide upon.

Without this role, vendors and consultants naturally fall back on prior experience. They map requirements based on how courts elsewhere worked. Court staff, equally reasonably, assume their way of working is obvious and universal. Everyone believes they understand each other — until the system behaves differently than expected.

Why This Matters to Court Leaders

Courts are not interchangeable operating environments. Differences such as:

• unified vs. non-unified

• clerk-driven vs. judge-driven docket control

• division-specific practices (criminal vs. juvenile delinquency, child welfare, general civil, probate, etc.)

• statutory or rule-based constraints

directly shape how technology must behave. When these realities are not translated explicitly, the system may technically function while operational credibility collapses.

The translator role protects the court by ensuring that:

• assumptions are surfaced early

• terminology is aligned deliberately

• workflow ownership is clarified by division or team

• configuration decisions are grounded in legal and operational reality

This is not bureaucracy or overhead. It is valuable and ongoing risk prevention.

What Helps (Observed Pattern)

• A clearly designated translator who understands justice operations and system behavior

• Translation occurring in both directions: justice → technology and technology → justice

• A living terminology crosswalk that is maintained throughout implementation

• Real examples used to ground discussions, not abstract descriptions

• Early challenge of assumptions before they harden into configuration decisions

What Hurts (Observed Pattern)

• Assuming shared terminology means shared understanding

• Treating translation as a one-time requirements exercise

• Relying on documentation alone to convey operational nuance

• Waiting until testing to discover misalignment

Leading Signals to Watch

• Frequent “that’s not what we meant” moments during demos

• Configuration decisions being revisited repeatedly

• Disagreement about who owns a step in the process

• Late discovery of legal or rule-based constraints

Takeaway for Leaders

If no one is explicitly responsible for translation, misalignment is already occurring — you just have not seen the consequences yet. The Justice Translator role is not optional in complex court implementations. It is the safeguard that keeps legal reality, operational practice, and system behavior aligned over time.