The Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) has pledged to continue serving paper documents to defence solicitors amid concerns about its plan to go digital from April.

However, the Law Society said this week that criminal solicitors will continue to face ‘financial and regulatory risks’ in preparing to work digitally until other issues with the plan are resolved. A CPS spokesman told the Gazette: ‘The CPS has committed to providing a paper file where the defendant is in custody or the defence practitioner has not made contact with us to request a digital version of the case bundle.’

The CPS, he said, will serve documents electronically if the defence solicitor has indicated that they want to work digitally and have a criminal justice secure email account.

He said the CPS already works digitally with a number of defence practitioners on cases including large frauds, but would like to use secure email systems for all case information in files of up to 10 megabytes. This would increase efficiency and reduce storage and postal costs for defence solicitors, he added.

The CPS’s target to replace paperwork with secure electronic working across the criminal justice system has prompted concerns among defence solicitors. These include: the cost of IT upgrades for solicitors and of printing paper copies of files for clients; the difficulty of forwarding information received over secure email; and the provision of IT infrastructure in courts and prisons.

The chair of the Law Society’s criminal law committee, Richard Atkinson, the director of the Criminal Law Solicitors Association, Rodney Warren and the chief executive of the CPS, Peter Lewis, are meeting fortnightly to try to address the concerns.

Atkinson said the CPS announcement amounts to ‘a recognition that the idea of simply serving all papers digitally is not practicable without significant improvements to technological infrastructure in courts and prisons’.

He said defence solicitors accepted the aim of having a digital system, but not a ‘halfway house’ that simply transferred costs on to the defence. Warren said: ‘The CPS, especially its chief executive Peter Lewis, is doing everything possible to address the issues faced by defence solicitors and find ways to make things work.’

But he added that concern remains over how solicitors can pass on information sent electronically by the CPS without falling foul of data protection laws.