Alan Carlson

Alan Carlson has worked as a court executive and management consultant in state trial courts for 47 years. He served as Court Executive Officer (court administrator, clerk of court, and jury commissioner) in both the Orange County and San Francisc Superior Courts, as Executive Officer of the Monterey County Superior Court, and Assistant Executive Officer of the Alameda County Superior Court. He has also served as President of Justice Management Institute (court management consultants), Director of Court Services at the Judicial Council of California, and as a Staff Attorney at the National Center for State Courts. He has a JD from the University of California, College of Law, San Francisco, and a BS in industrial engineering and operations research from the University of California at Berkeley.

Alan has worked in four California Superior Courts for a total of 26 years. For 23 years he was the court administrator reporting directly to the judges of the court, and for 15 of these years he also served as the clerk of the court. He has served under 30 Presiding Judges and Chief Justices during his career. Among his accomplishments in these courts are the merger of two levels of trial courts into a unified trial court, implementation of e-filing, the shift to an all-electronic record, business process re-engineering of all trial court operations, and development of portals to assist self-represented litigants in small claims and divorce cases.

As a court management consultant, Alan has worked on projects in 43 state trial courts at the county or city level and 19 state Supreme Courts in 33 states and one foreign country. Areas of particular expertise include criminal case flow management, trial court funding, trial court governance, the development and implementation of policies for public access to court records, and drafting privacy and civil liberties policies for criminal justice systems.

Recently, Alan has written and spoken about what has happened to civil case filings over the last 16 to 41 plus years in five states and the benefits and risks of artificial intelligence applications in the justice system.