Solicitors may be forced to file documents electronically and use other IT systems to support the civil litigation reforms.

Lord Justice Jackson, the reforms’ architect, devoted his 13th lecture on the reforms’ implementation last week to call for an integrated courts IT system – and on lawyers to use it.

‘The question of compulsion may have to be considered,’ Jackson told the Society for Computers and Law. He referred to the precedent of Singapore where after ‘practitioners were initially reluctant to use electronic filing’ the rules were changed. ‘Solicitors must be willing to change long-cherished habits and accept service by email,’ he said.

Jackson warned that all the planned reforms have consequences for the IT systems used by solicitors and some will need specific software to be developed.

Such new systems include:

  • Standard directions and model directions. Software ‘currently in an advanced stage of production’ will generate appropriate directions in county court cases. Templates for directions will be made available to all, including litigants in person, through a government website.
  • Automated compliance monitoring. A system to help courts monitor compliance with orders is under development, Jackson said. This will email parties advising them on impending deadlines and alert judges when deadlines have been missed. The latter part of the system would impose duties on parties, requiring them to tick boxes online when tasks have been accomplished. ‘Such box-ticking would take time and therefore generate modest additional costs,’ Jackson said.
  • Costs management. A form to enable parties to produce budgets at the outset so the court can manage the litigation in accordance with approved budgets ‘is now being developed’.
  • E-disclosure. Development of systems to manage the disclosure of documents ‘is critical to the survival of effective adversarial litigation in the digital age’.

On top of these systems, Jackson said there is ‘an overarching need for the civil courts to move from paper systems to electronic systems, just as every other public service has done’. While some elements are already in place, they are ‘incomplete and disconnected’, he said.

While there have been ‘problems with various government IT systems in the past’, Jackson said that other jurisdictions had successfully integrated court IT. ‘It should not be beyond our powers to do the same in the UK, especially if we purchase off-the-shelf systems and build on them,’ he said.