I tip my hat to Frances Gibb at the Times this week for referencing our story revealing that the Business Court, due to replace the various commercial courts in the new Rolls Building, is slipping back into 2011.

That we need a modern, technologically enabled Commercial Court is beyond doubt – the last lord chief justice, Lord Phillips, was unequivocal in his valedictory report on the state of the courts in April 2008 when he said that the court estate is ‘an area of ever-growing concern because of a history of under-investment and growing [£200m] maintenance backlog’.

The frankly bizarre tale behind the non-creation of a decent IT system for the Commercial Court just adds to the woe. As we’ve been reporting for several years now, an IT system that both runs cases and allows law firms to submit and deal with documents electronically when working with and in the Commercial Court was piloted… then shelved in favour of a national system, which itself has now been canned…

Now we hear that the Courts Service is once again piloting an IT system that sounds remarkably similar to the original one. All this has cost millions in consulting, as we also revealed, and got us all almost no further on than we were three years ago.

What does this mean to law firms? To me, it means that our commercial litigators will increasingly feel like men and women out of time as they walk our commercial courts in the coming years, with high-tech systems in their law firms, and high-tech courts in foreign countries, while our ‘new Business Court’ remains a building site until the Olympics are almost upon us.

Let’s hope no further delays, caused a government seemingly rapidly running out of cash, put it back even further…