Lessons Learned From Taking Justice Remote During the COVID Pandemic

### Overview In this presentation, Jack McCarthy (CIO of the New Jersey Courts) and Sajed discuss how the New Jersey Judiciary transitioned from an almost entirely in-person court system across roughly 700 sites to a remote virtual court system on just three days of notice during the COVID-19 pandemic. Operating under a unified statewide judiciary serving 7 million residents, 13,000 staff, 100,000 attorneys, and 40,000 police officers, the IT department drew on years of prior technical planning and security policies to support remote judicial proceedings securely and rapidly.

### Key Topics - **Threat Trends During the Pandemic:** As remote operations escalated, the team tracked surging threats communicated via MS-ISAC and Homeland Security, such as Zoom bombing, phishing campaigns weaponizing COVID-19 lures (showing up to a 4,000% increase in related domains), targeted regional lures, and major supply-chain events like SolarWinds. - **Rapid Operational Pivot:** Moving from 1% remote work in February 2020 to near 100% remote within days. Because the judiciary only had 2,500 laptops and iPads for 13,000 staff, they allowed employees to take pre-encrypted desktop PCs home as large portable machines. - **Application Continuity:** To maintain courthouse filings and payments, IT launched the Judiciary Electronic Document Submission (JEDS) system in three days to handle filings and fee collections electronically. - **Scaling Remote Infrastructure:** Upgrading remote access from a few hundred concurrent connections to thousands via physical servers and cloud bursting into AWS. Transitioning from Skype to Microsoft Teams for 10,000 users in one day, and expanding Zoom to host over 400 court sessions concurrently. - **Security Posture & Enforcement:** Upholding pre-existing baseline policies—such as mandatory two-factor authentication, device full-disk encryption, and network access control (NAC)—rather than compromising controls during the crisis.

### Technical Details - **Data Center & Network Topology:** The court operates a hub-and-spoke model terminating in Trenton, reinforced with triangular redundancy across multiple platforms and quarterly disaster recovery failover exercises. Legacy infrastructure spans mainframes, COBOL, .NET, Java, and Pega BPM software. - **Remote Access Architecture:** - **VDI:** Scaled VMware VDI from 100 concurrent sessions to 1,500 (averaging ~1,450 daily), while also utilizing VDI for secure public access terminals. - **VPN Capacity:** Scaled on-premises VPN appliances up to 7,500 connections before establishing a secure VPN infrastructure directly in AWS within a week. - **Posture & Access Controls:** Implemented Zscaler for endpoint posture assessment prior to connection, blocked risky ports (such as RDP and SMB) exposed to threats like BlueKeep and DejaBlue, and enforced network access controls to automatically patch delinquent systems and block unauthorized external Windows PCs or untrusted IoT devices. - **Platform Migrations:** Migrated 10,000 staff to Microsoft Teams in a single weekend to offload roughly 10,000 weekly administrative meetings away from the core on-prem data center.

### Takeaways - **Security Must Precede the Crisis:** Quick emergency response was only possible because essential controls—full-disk encryption, MFA, and asset visibility—were already established before the pandemic. - **Virtual Court Viability:** The judiciary conducted over 250,000 remote court events with 2.5 million participants in a single year, proving that routine dockets, conferences, and uncontested matters can be resolved remotely without demanding in-person courthouse appearances. - **Future Model:** The judiciary expects a lasting hybrid model (approximately 60% in-office and 40% remote), moving toward a Zero Trust security architecture and reimagining traditional court procedures permanently.