Calling for Canada to Shed Its Provincial, Outdated Approach to Legal Technology

05
Jul
2012

Luigi Benetton

Canadians just celebrated Canada Day on July 1, and many of us took Monday July 2 off work, making a long holiday weekend of it. Many Canadian lawyers wish they didn't have to come back to the inefficiencies of the legal system, but that's what they're doing. (I'm not a lawyer, but I speak to enough of them that I feel comfortable writing this.)

Of course, Canadian lawyers aren't alone in the world in bearing such frustrations.

And please don't take my words to mean that all justice systems throughout Canada are in the dark ages. When Canadian lawyers talk about eJustice systems that belong in the 21st century, they commonly point west to British Columbia. B.C.'s Justice Information System (a.k.a. JUSTIN) provides a criminal court information database accessible to the judiciary, court services, crown counsel, corrections and police.

BC has also been providing civil e-search since 2004, e-filing for civil matters since 2005 and criminal/traffic e-search since 2008. (Note: I took much of this information, and cribbed the last sentence, from an article I recently wrote for Lawyers Weekly Magazine. See the full article here.) Systems like Public Access to Court Electronic Records or PACER (pacer.gov) prove that the eJustice movement is thriving in the U.S. as well.

All that said, other jurisdictions in Canada aren't as advanced as B.C. Take Ontario, for instance, where I live. In Canada's most populous province, legal staff still line up at a court office to file motions, then at another one to submit other documents… you get the idea, and if you want to know more about what Ontario lawyers face, read this article by Melissa Wilson of Precedent. (Check out the somewhat snide Sept. 14 comment at the end of this article which blames Ontario’s outdated courts on Ontario’s Premier bending over backwards for labour unions.)

Even the judges are getting tired of this old-fashioned, cumbersome court system. I quote Ontario Justice David Brown's March rant as I read it in a Globe and Mail article headlined “Judge bashes Ontario’s archaic court document system” to make the point. Here's what I consider his best nugget:

“Consign our paper-based document management system to the scrap heap of history and equip this Court with a modern, electronic document system. Yes, Virginia, somewhere, someone must have created such a system, and perhaps some time, in an another decade or so, rumours of such a possibility may waft into the paper-strewn corridors of the Court Services Division of the Ministry of the Attorney General and a slow awakening may occur.”

Even news items about forthcoming systems, like this one in the Financial Post, are tinged with skepticism.

Writing this post runs counter to my own leanings as a technology enthusiast and copywriter/journalist who writes for and about technology leaders in the field. I don't want to end this post on a negative note, and I won't, even if I have to use a tangent to the topic of eJustice to give it a positive spin.

I recently wrote an (as-yet-unpublished) article about online bar associations. During my research for this article, a lawyer I know introduced me to the Internet Bar Organization. The IBO does many interesting things, but here's what stood out for me: IBO members study the inter-jurisdictional business models of Internet giants like eBay or Amazon to provide developing countries with justice systems that are cost-effective and enable entrepreneurs to flourish.

And when parties in North America engage in a dispute, use of eJustice systems could reduce costs in many ways, both obvious and less so. For instance, discovery guru Dominic Jaar told me that efiling systems could be configured to perform eDiscovery, saving parties that engage in complex litigation thousands of dollars in review costs.

Such systems likely wouldn't work across all areas of law. But could you imagine that type of logic - cost-effective justice systems - finding its way into more areas of law? Is this too unrealistic to hope for? Let us know in the comments below.