From the Lawyers Weekly Magazine, February 18, 2005
In a decade, says Allison Stanfield, it will be as commonplace for lawyers to
communicate electronically with the courts as they do now with their clients
For many practitioners, the concept of electronic litigation may be an
unfamiliar one. This is likely to change rapidly over the coming years, however,
particularly as practitioners begin to realise the time and cost savings offered
by electronic filing of documents with the courts, begin to receive documents on
hard drives, email repositories and laptops from their clients for discovery
instead of boxes of hard copy, and are required to present these electronic
documents in their original format in court.
Electronic lodgement
Electronic lodgement of documents with the courts is not a new concept. Back
in 1997 I was involved in a successful electronic filing pilot between the
Queensland Court of Appeal and the state's Legal Aid Office. The test showed
that we could do it; the technology was the easy part, but the cultural barriers
we faced in implementing the solution proved too great at that time. Electronic
filing has been, and is being used successfully in some jurisdictions in the US
and elsewhere in the world. Likewise, some jurisdictions within Australia have
implemented e-filing.
The majority of legal practitioners have probably never used an electronic
filing facility to lodge their court documents. The traditional method of
engaging clerks to walk up to the counter to file documents is still the most
common method. This is in the day and age where we can do our banking online, we
can shop online, order our groceries and request they be delivered online and
find an answer to just about any question we might like to pose. It seems,
however, that the legal profession lags well behind the rest of the business
community when it comes to utilising the benefits of the internet.
