Legal Brief for January, 2016

Are The Courts Keeping Up With Technology?

We all know how much the changes in technology have affected our work and personal lives over the past 15 years - what was new and "wow" last year is now common place this year and likely fading behind us as we move on to ever faster ways of handling tasks and projects.  How are our Courts doing in keeping up with these changes?  Are they keeping pace?  Are they being innovative or are they still grinding away in the manner that they did 50 years ago?  In some areas our Courts are definitely adapting to and adopting new technologies while in other areas things are not changing perhaps as much as we would like.  The pace of change also depends on where one lives in Canada.

In Alberta there have been a variety of changes that have enhanced "the administration of justice", which is after all the primary duty of our Court system.  Some changes are fairly minor, but are very practical and environmentally friendly.  In Edmonton for example, both the Provincial Court and the Court of Queen's Bench no longer print off their daily case listings on paper and post these outside the various Courtrooms (these could run literally into the hundreds if not thousands of pages in the "old" days).  The Courts have replaced these with electronic message boards which list all the Courtrooms, the matters scheduled for those Courtrooms and the times they are scheduled for.  Another example is that if a lawyer has a pre-trial motion scheduled for hearing, and they need to adjourn it to a new date, all that they now have to do is e-mail an "e-form" to the Court office rather than make a personal appearance in Court to make the adjournment.

Other jurisdictions, both in Canada and abroad, are taking some very innovative steps that may eventually be followed here in Alberta.  In the U.K.  the judicial system is currently reviewing the possibility of setting up an "on-line Court" for what it terms as "lower value disputes" in civil law matters, which are those involving areas such as contracts, property and debt collection.  The proposed system is to involve not only document filing and exchange on-line, but also conciliation and mediation by on-line resources.  If current plans continue it would transition to be the primary mode of judicial decision making rather than the current "in person" court system for these types of disputes.

A similar model is soon to come "on-line" in British Columbia for what we would term as "Small Claims Court" type disputes.  B.C.  has enacted what is known as The Civil Resolution Tribunal Act which provides for an on-line system that will be used for claims of $10,000.00 or less and which will not require documents to be filed in a Courthouse or appearances in a hearing or a trial.  Instead people will be able to use the website for the system on a 24/7 basis to deal with the other party.  The B.C.  system has been likened to the dispute resolution system offered by eBay, which according to statistics resolves roughly 45 million disputes per year between eBay customers purely by the disputing parties using a software program available on the eBay website.

Changes will undoubtedly continue to come to the way our Courts carry out their functions in society in the years ahead. I expect that the practice of law involving dealings with our Courts will be very different in 2026 than it is today.