What Does SpaceX Have to Do With Court Modernization?

I recently came across a short list that SpaceX uses as an operational algorithm, and the more I sat with it, the more it felt like it was also written for courts. Not because courts build rockets, but because courts, like any complex institution, live or die by the processes they keep, and the ones they have the discipline to remove. SpaceX’s algorithm is not inspirational, and it is not dressed up in modern jargon. It is simply five rules, presented in a specific order, that force you to recognize that if you modernize without discipline, you are not actually modernizing. You are just moving the mess to a newer platform.

Interestingly, it appears that I have been following this sequence for more than a decade without knowing it had been turned into a neat five-step algorithm. I did not arrive here because I was trying to run a courthouse like a rocket company. I arrived here because courts cannot afford careless change. When we modernize poorly, we do not just waste money. We quietly increase the risk of unequal treatment, opaque process, and decisions that are harder to review. In other words, we risk becoming less legitimate at the exact moment the public is asking us to be more legitimate.

As I read the five rules, it became clear to me that courts rarely modernize this way. Too often, we modernize backwards. We begin with the tool, not the purpose. We keep every legacy step to avoid conflict, then we pay a vendor to digitize it, and then we act surprised when nothing meaningfully changes except the invoice. Meanwhile, the work does not stop. Caseloads rise, staffing gets tighter, and the public walks into the same old experience, only now it has a portal, a password, and a help desk ticket number. When people ask why the justice system feels slow or inconsistent, the answer is often not a lack of effort. It is that we have been building improvements on top of a foundation we never audited, never simplified, and never had the courage to subtract from.

That is why I talk about modernization so often, and why I have been doing the work for years, long before AI became the shiny new object and long before anyone started calling this “digital transformation.” I have seen what process creep does to a court system. Process creep produces inconsistency, inconsistency breeds cynicism, and cynicism corrodes trust. And once trust erodes, every decision we make becomes harder to accept, even the right ones. In a legitimacy-based institution, the technology is never the point. The point is whether the institution still looks and feels like it deserves the authority it exercises.

Here are the rules as I read them, and how they translate when you view them through the lens of building a modern justice system.

1. Make Requirements Less Dumb

Courts are built on requirements, and many of those requirements are essential. Due process is not a preference. Notice is not optional. And the integrity of the record is not a luxury. They are the architecture of legitimacy, and any modernization effort that treats them as inconveniences is not modernizing the justice system. It is weakening it.

The problem is that courts also operate under a second category of requirements that routinely masquerade as mandates. These are the “requirements” that exist because someone remembers them being enforced twenty years ago, or because a particular practice hardened into culture, or because a workaround became tradition after a system limitation disappeared. This is the “that’s how it’s always been done” mindset, and it is one of the most expensive forces in government because it hides in plain sight. It survives leadership changes. It survives technology changes. It even survives rule changes, because it is enforced socially rather than analytically.

Modernization starts when you separate true mandates from inherited habits, and you do it with specificity rather than slogans. When someone tells you, “We have to do it this way,” you ask a question that should be ordinary in courts but often feels impolite: required by what authority and for what purpose? If the best answer you can get is “because that’s how we’ve always done it,” then you are not looking at a requirement. You are looking at technical debt, and courts pay interest on that debt every day in the form of delay, confusion, and avoidable human frustration.

2. Delete the Part or Process Step

Once you identify which “requirements” are really just inertia, you reach the step that makes institutions nervous, because it requires subtraction instead of addition. Courts are collectors by nature. We add steps to prevent yesterday’s mistake, and then we keep those steps forever. We add forms, approvals, duplicate entries and manual checks to compensate for outdated workflows. And then we add a workaround, which becomes the new process.

Over time, the court becomes a museum of old problems, and the staff becomes the tour guide, explaining to the public why the system works the way it does. That is when you see the Big Red Book appear. Sometimes it is literally a binder, sometimes a shared drive, sometimes one person’s memory. But it is always the same concept: the real operational system living outside the actual system. The Big Red Book feels helpful because it is a survival tool. It tells people how to navigate the court. The problem is that if a court requires a survival tool, the court is not serving the public. It is testing them.

The deeper problem is that shadow workflows cannot be audited, measured, or scaled, and anything that cannot be audited, measured, or scaled will eventually become inefficient and ineffective.

Deleting the Big Red Book is not an insult to institutional knowledge. It is a decision to bring that knowledge into the light, convert it into transparent workflow, and make the court legible to the people it serves. Modernization is not digitizing the binder. Modernization is deleting the binder altogether.

3. Optimize

Only after you delete can you optimize, and this is where courts routinely reverse the order. We buy tools to streamline what we have, and we call it progress, even when what we have is a complicated path built around assumptions that no longer hold. That is how you end up with expensive software that looks modern and still behaves like paper, because it was designed to preserve paper habits rather than replace them.

A concrete example of optimization done correctly is online calendaring, but only if you design it with court legitimacy in mind. When parties can coordinate dates through an online system, you reduce the back-and-forth phone calls, the missed messages, the avoidable resets, and the needless friction that consumes staff time and creates public frustration. You also reduce the opportunities for misunderstanding, which is a quiet but persistent source of delay in every courthouse.

However, optimization becomes dangerous when it quietly transfers authority away from accountable decision-makers. That is why the design choice matters: the parties can select the date, but the setting still requires the judge’s signature. That signature is not ceremonial, and it is not a nostalgic attachment to paper. It is an authorization point. It is the moment the institution owns the setting, can be held accountable for it, and can explain it when questions arise. The system coordinates. The judge authorizes. When courts modernize, that distinction is the difference between a streamlined process and an unaccountable process.

4. Accelerate

In engineering, acceleration is cycle time, and in courts, cycle time shows up as delay. The public does not experience “process.” The public experiences waiting. They experience missed workdays, childcare complications, uncertainty, and a lingering sense that the system cannot get out of its own way. Delay also creates legal consequences: memories fade, evidence becomes harder to marshal, pressure increases to settle for the wrong reasons, and outcomes become less connected to truth and more connected to stamina.

Courts do not accelerate by telling people to work harder. We accelerate by building a repeatable lane and scaling it. I have seen the same pattern again and again: if something “works” only in one division because a particular judge or clerk is willing to brute-force it, then it is not a process. It is a personality. Personalities burn out or retire. Systems endure.

Acceleration in the justice system means proving a workflow in one division, then scaling it across the courthouse, and then scaling it across the broader justice system, partners included. This matters because the justice system is not one organization. It is a network. The handoffs are where time gets lost, and the handoffs are also where accountability gets blurry. If your modernization effort only improves one node while the rest of the network stays disconnected, you may create a local success story, but you will not meaningfully improve the public’s experience of justice.

5. Automate

This is where the AI conversation usually begins, and it is precisely why so many modernization projects disappoint. Courts want to jump to automation before they have done the hard work of clarifying requirements, deleting dead weight, and stabilizing a defensible workflow. If you skip those steps, you do not automate excellence. You automate dysfunction.

When you do the work in the right order, automation becomes both feasible and defensible. Calendaring is a perfect example because it is measurable and because it has patterns that data can reveal more reliably than intuition. Once you have examined years of data, you can identify which settings reduce no-shows, which distributions of cases on any given day are sustainable, and which patterns predict resets. At that point, delegating portions of scheduling to AI agents can be a rational step, because the agent is operating within a lane you have defined rather than inventing one.

But courts have a non-negotiable condition that must govern automation: whatever is automated must be auditable and overridable. The question is not whether a system can schedule. The question is whether the court can explain why it scheduled, whether the court can monitor outcomes for process creep over time, whether the court can detect uneven impact, and whether a human decision-maker can override the system when justice requires it. Courts cannot afford invisible decision-making, even when it is efficient, because efficiency is not the currency of legitimacy. Trust is.

Automation comes last because in a legitimacy-based institution, the system must be able to show its work. If it cannot, it will not be trusted, and it should not be placed in the operational spine of the judiciary.

Conclusion: The 2026 Mandate
As we look toward 2026, the question for the judiciary is no longer whether we will integrate these technologies, but whether we will do so in a way that preserves legitimacy, transparency, and public trust. We are entering an era of “Agentic AI”—digital team members that can manage workflows, draft routine documents, and schedule hearings at a pace that will tempt every institution to delegate first and govern later.

The temptation to skip straight to Step 5 (Automate) has never been higher. But if we do not use 2026 to first Make Requirements Less Dumb and Delete the Part or Process Step, we will simply build a faster, more expensive version of the status quo.

So I invite my colleagues to adopt this five-step discipline not as a tech agenda, but as a preservation project. If we can spend the coming year stripping away the Big Red Books and the workflows that make our courts inefficient, we will not just be modernizing. We will be proving that the justice system still deserves the public’s trust in a digital age.

The rockets are ready. We just need to make sure the launchpad is clear of everything that no longer serves the mission of justice.