In March 2026, two federal judges stood before their colleagues and delivered a striking message. The federal judiciary is accelerating the replacement of CM/ECF — the case management system US courts have relied on for nearly three decades. District courts will begin implementation within the year.
The announcement was significant. Since the late 1990s, CM/ECF has served as the backbone of federal court operations. It processes filings for every federal district, appellate, and bankruptcy court in the country. It holds over one billion court records. Now, the system is finally being retired.
For federal courts, this is a long-overdue modernization. But the broader landscape of American courts and administrative agencies raises a more important question. How far behind is everyone else — and are they finally starting to catch up?
The federal overhaul is a signal. The real story is what it reveals about the administrative courts and tribunals that haven’t made the same move yet.
The System Nobody Talks About
Most people picture a trial court when they think about government technology. The courthouse. The jury box. The judge in robes. That imagery shapes the public understanding of how legal technology works.
Running parallel to the trial court system — and largely invisible to the public — is an entirely separate layer of government adjudication. Administrative courts, tribunals, and agencies handle a staggering volume of contested matters every day:
→ Workers’ compensation hearings, where injured employees dispute claim denials
→ Tax tribunal appeals, where businesses and property owners contest assessments
→ Unemployment insurance hearings, where laid-off workers appeal benefit decisions
→ Professional licensing disputes, where agencies decide who can practise medicine, law, or nursing
→ Regulatory enforcement hearings, where agencies adjudicate environmental, safety, and compliance violations
Administrative Law Judges — ALJs — conduct all of these proceedings. Approximately 30,000 of them work across the United States today.
That number is not a rounding error. It exceeds the total number of federal and state trial court judges combined. ALJs collectively manage tens of millions of cases every year. Their decisions directly affect people’s livelihoods, health coverage, financial security, and professional careers.
Approximately 30,000 Administrative Law Judges manage tens of millions of cases annually in the United States. Most still work on legacy systems — or no dedicated system at all.
The Technology Gap Nobody Wanted to Admit
Here is the uncomfortable truth: administrative court technology has not changed meaningfully in twenty years.
While the federal judiciary built, tested, and now accelerated a modern CM/ECF replacement, the administrative court ecosystem fell behind. The reasons are structural. Administrative courts sit in the executive branch, not the judicial branch. Each agency procures its own technology independently. No centralized oversight body exists to push a coordinated upgrade. No shared modernization initiative is underway.
The result is a fragmented technology landscape. Some agencies run internally built systems that engineers designed for a different era and have been patching ever since. Others rely on generic case management platforms that engineers never built for adjudicative workflow. Many agencies combine spreadsheets, shared drives, email chains, and paper — with a web portal added on top for public-facing filing.
These costs are not abstract. Hearing scheduling takes weeks longer than it should. Case files get lost in handoffs between ALJ territories. Annual territory rotation cycles — common in workers’ compensation commissions — force staff to manually transfer hundreds of active cases between judges. Reports require significant manual effort to produce. Audit trails exist on paper instead of searchable, structured data.
ALJs, clerks, and administrators absorb these costs every day — along with the people whose cases depend on them.
Why Change Is Finally Coming
The federal CM/ECF announcement is not an isolated event. Several forces are converging on the administrative court space at once.
First, the cybersecurity environment has changed dramatically. Federal judges described an acute and persistent cyber threat to the existing system publicly in March 2026. State and executive-branch agencies face the same pressures. Legacy systems that engineers never designed for modern security requirements are increasingly difficult — and expensive — to defend.
Second, the post-COVID shift to remote hearings exposed major infrastructure gaps. Administrative courts that had conducted in-person hearings for decades pivoted to video in weeks. Many succeeded — but on infrastructure that was never built for remote proceedings. The workarounds agencies used in 2020 and 2021 are still in place in 2026. The strain is showing.
Third, legislative change is creating new procedural complexity that legacy systems cannot accommodate. Kansas’s SB 430, passed in 2024, introduced significant new requirements for workers’ compensation ALJ hearings. Tighter evidence exchange timelines, new examination rules, and revised settlement documentation all followed. Similar reforms are moving through state legislatures across the country. Every new requirement adds another workflow step to an already underpowered system.
Fourth — and perhaps most importantly — the procurement environment is finally opening up. State agencies that once relied on a small number of large vendors have begun to recognise a fundamental problem. Those vendors built their products for trial courts, not administrative tribunals. The needs differ. The workflows differ. The market is now responding.
The federal overhaul set a new baseline for what modern court technology should deliver. For agencies and tribunals that haven’t modernised yet, the window to act on their own terms is closing.
Where Trial Court Technology Gets It Wrong
The dominant vendors in the court technology market built their products for trial courts. Tyler Technologies’ Odyssey platform — used in over seventeen statewide judicial branch contracts — targets the workflows of civil and criminal litigation: case filing, docketing, scheduling, jury management, sentencing, and appeals.
Those workflows bear little resemblance to administrative adjudication. An ALJ conducting workers’ compensation hearings operates in a fundamentally different environment from a trial court judge. Cases arrive through agency intake, not court filings. Schedulers assign hearings across rotating territorial structures. Evidence exchange follows agency-specific procedural rules rather than civil court discovery. ALJs issue decisions as orders and awards, not judgments. The appeals process runs through the agency’s own commission or board before it ever reaches a court of record.
Agencies that have tried using trial court CMS platforms face predictable results: extensive configuration work to force the system into workflows it was never designed for, ongoing friction between the platform’s assumptions and the agency’s reality, and support from vendors who prioritise their much larger trial court client base.
Agencies that built their own systems face a different set of challenges. Internal IT capacity constraints limit progress. Keeping pace with modern security and infrastructure requirements proves difficult. Maintaining a bespoke platform becomes harder as staff leave and institutional knowledge walks out the door.
Neither option scales. Neither option is what a modern administrative court actually needs.
What Modern Administrative Court Technology Actually Looks Like
Purpose-built case management for administrative adjudication starts from the actual workflow — how cases move through an agency’s adjudication process from intake to decision — rather than adapting a trial court platform to fit.
That means intake and docketing designed around agency-specific filing requirements, not civil court procedures. Scheduling tools must understand the territorial assignment structures of workers’ compensation ALJs and the multi-commissioner dockets of tax appeal bodies. Workflow automation should enforce the procedural timelines that legislation like SB 430 introduced — without requiring manual tracking. Decision management needs to support the full range of ALJ orders and commission-level review. Reporting and audit infrastructure must produce the data that agency leadership, legislative oversight, and the public increasingly demand.
Technology delivery also matters. Government agencies are not in the business of managing enterprise software infrastructure. True cloud-native deployment — with predictable subscription pricing and automatic updates — is not a luxury. For agencies that have managed their own servers and manually applied patches for a decade, it represents a fundamental operational improvement.
CaseHub: Built for This
Azul Arc built CaseHub because this gap was clear — and no existing solution adequately addressed it.
CaseHub is a case management platform designed from the ground up for administrative adjudication. Azul Arc did not adapt it from a trial court system. The team did not build it on a general-purpose enterprise platform and configure it for court use. CaseHub addresses the specific workflow, procedural complexity, and operational reality of the agencies, commissions, and tribunals that sit in the administrative law space.
CaseHub currently serves state agencies and administrative courts across the United States — bodies managing workers’ compensation hearings, tax appeals, regulatory adjudication, and licensing disputes. The platform handles the full case lifecycle: intake and docketing, scheduling and calendar management, document and evidence management, hearing workflow, decision and order management, appeals tracking, and reporting.
The platform is cloud-native and built for the security requirements of government agencies. Azul Arc designed it for implementation without the eighteen-month configuration marathons that characterise legacy court technology deployments.
Above all, CaseHub is built with the people who use it every day in mind. ALJs, clerks, and administrators need a system that reduces cognitive load — not one that adds to it.
The best technology for administrative courts is not the technology that works for most courts. It is the technology built for the specific workflow, scale, and procedural complexity that administrative adjudication actually requires.
The Window Is Open — But It Won’t Stay That Way
The federal CM/ECF replacement will take two to three years. District courts begin implementing first, followed by appellate and bankruptcy courts. The federal judiciary’s IT Long Range Plan for FY2026 describes a comprehensive modernisation of the technology infrastructure underlying American federal courts.
This process will raise expectations across the entire court and adjudication technology ecosystem. Legislators, oversight bodies, and the public will develop a clearer picture of what modern court technology can deliver. Agencies and tribunals still operating on legacy systems will face growing pressure to close the gap.
For state administrative agencies, workers’ compensation commissions, tax tribunals, and ALJ offices, the question is no longer whether to modernise. The real question is whether to do so proactively — on their own terms, with the right tool for their specific needs — or to wait until the pressure becomes unavoidable.
Agencies that move first gain more time for a thoughtful implementation. They can configure the platform around their specific procedural requirements. They retain more leverage in setting the terms of a vendor relationship before procurement becomes urgent.
Agencies that wait will face the same transition under pressure — with the added risk of choosing a solution based on availability rather than fit.
About CaseHub
CaseHub is Azul Arc’s purpose-built case management platform for administrative courts, tribunals, and government agencies. Azul Arc designed it for the workflow, procedural complexity, and operational requirements of administrative adjudication — not adapted from a trial court system. CaseHub currently serves multiple US state governments.
→ Learn more about CaseHub at azularc.com/casehub
→ Schedule a conversation with our team