Patrick Allen calls for urgent investment in information technology for the civil courts’ system
The IT revolution has changed the face of legal practice over the last 30 years. We acquired our first PCs and Macs in the early 1980s. We threw away our memory typewriters and golf ball printers. Later came the Internet, e-mails, BlackBerries, iPhones, the iPad, voice recognition and the Cloud. Communications between clients, solicitors, counsel and experts have been transformed by e-mail and scanning.
The revolution stops, however, when we arrive at the court system which is largely an IT-free zone for litigants and their lawyers.
Lord Woolf in his 1996 report on the Reform of Civil Justice suggested that the proper use of IT was one of the cornerstones for the reform success. However, there was no appetite for investment by the government and there is no doubt that the government’s failure to invest in IT for the courts held back the true potential of his reforms.
Hopes dashed
There have been occasional rays of hope that things would change. In 2007 I was a member
