David Oldham observes how IT is increasingly used in court
In a previous article (NLJ 1 May 2009), I commented on the failure of government to provide funding for the sort of technological assistance that Lord Woolf envisaged 10 years ago for courts and judges. In this article, I consider what other sorts of IT are available which might help judges and lawyers to conduct litigation more efficiently.
I admit immediately that I am not a “techie”, and so I do not pretend to understand the technical aspects of a lot of IT. What interests me is how user-friendly it is, how easily it could be introduced, and whether realistically it might be affordable. Will it help me in my day-to-day work, and will it make the system more efficient, and reduce delay and cost?
In many ways, the county courts in England and Wales still operate much as they did 100 years ago. The system remains paper-based, with paper files for every case. In my previous article, I mentioned that work on an Electronic Filing and Document Management programme (EFDM) has stopped. What
