E-litigation: Challenges and opportunities ahead

It was clear from a series of speeches given this year by the Lord Chancellor, the Lord Chief Justice, and the chief executive of HM Courts and Tribunals Service (HMCTS) that the desire to implement digital change across the justice system is real and joined up.

The November spending review revealed that £700m is being made available to invest
in the IT infrastructure needed
to deliver a modern justice platform - a platform that will
be built for online and mobile working, with open integration points to allow data to be transferred between systems.

If dispute data can be
made more available via open integration points, I believe
we will start to see innovation socially, commercially, and
in the legal world, based around applications that can analyse the volumes of data that reside in these databases to derive insight that guides decisions at the right time and, ideally, for lower cost.

In spite of advances in
digital signature solutions
and legislation, many processes continue to generate forms and documents that are printed, physically signed, and then scanned into a document management system. The quality of data associated with these files is variable and often of limited value for analysing their content to derive additional insight and drive automated processing.

Availability of data

To maximise this opportunity, we need to increase the availability of data about a
case in the courts' systems. Electronic filing is a good first step, and allows data to be captured as filers complete forms in connection with a filing.

Understandably, lawyers are reluctant to create forms in their own systems and then re-key much of the same information into the court's electronic filing system. Law firms also have
their own quality assurance
and control processes to monitor the work product leaving their offices on behalf of clients, and to manage their cash flows.
For instance, in a digital world, payment by cheque (and the controls that exist for approving its raising) will no longer be
an option. Instead, credit card payment or payment by account will become the way the courts take payment.

New services like HMCTS's electronic filing and case management system, CE-File,
can be designed to reduce the re-keying required by users,
but there will always be limitations on the extent to
which a court's digital platform can accommodate the specific needs of each law firm to manage their internal workflows.

After enabling electronic filing, the next innovation needs to be connecting lawyers' systems with the courts' so that data can be input once and then transmitted directly into the courts' systems. CE-File, for example, will enable this connectivity with a flexible open interface, but it is going to require law firms to adopt and adapt to these new ways of working and invest in their own tools to enable them to connect with the courts' systems.

In a more digital world, the opportunity exists to automate routine processes, removing the need for manual interventions, and to allow the courts to focus on proactive case management. Lord Justice Briggs is consulting on the introduction of designated judicial officers, who may play this role.

A more proactive court
should be able to more effectively reduce the time
from case initiation to final determination, reducing the number of adjournments in
the system driven by not having
the relevant actors and case information in the right place
at the time a scheduled hearing
is due to take place.

Online ecosystem

If digital change is adopted through the courts' systems,
a more connected online legal ecosystem, operating with
open systems and standards, presents myriad opportunities, particularly if we put data from the courts at its heart, allowing other systems to drive decisions based on the data.

For example, bankruptcy
data could be used to power
risk management solutions, patent court data could be
used to drive trading strategies in algorithmic trading, and data from judgments could be used to power decision support systems for lawyers and litigants to inform litigation strategies.
If HMCTS's data assets also include anonymised data from private settlements facilitated
by an online court, an idea proposed by the Civil Justice Council advisory, they will surely be an even more valuable reference source.

Digitisation, if successful, will lead to the availability of more case data and a more connected ecosystem, not only enabling the courts to become more efficient and play a more proactive case management role, but also stimulating innovation in and around the courts that will ultimately deliver lower-cost legal services and improve access to justice for the many. SJ

Jim Leason is vice president and head of court management solutions at Thomson Reuters