A judicial systems laboratory has been established and several large-scale information management systems projects have been undertaken within the Federal Judicial Center in Washington, D.C. The newness of the court application area, together with the experimental nature of the initial prototypes, required that the system building tools be as flexible and efficient as possible for effective software design and development. The size of the databases, the expected transaction volumes, and the long-term value of the court records required a data manipulation system capable of providing high performance and integrity. The resulting design criteria, the programming capabilities developed, and their use in system construction are described herein. This database programming facility has been especially designed as a technical management tool for the database administrator, while providing the applications programmer with a flexible database software interface for high productivity. Specifically, a network-type database management system using SAIL as the data manipulation host language is described. Generic data manipulation verb formats using SAIL's macro facilities and dynamic data structuring facilities allowing in-core database representations have been developed to achieve a level of flexibility not usually attained in conventional database systems.