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Transformation Of British Traditional Way Of Court Operation To Current Era Of Digitisation from shubham sahu's blog

We live in an era of digitization, where most functions of business and society are critically dependent on data of many different forms. As the digital revolution continues, the digitization of human activities generates large amounts of data, having the potential to be both disruptive and transformative.


Why digital justice?
Today’s courts are turning to digital justice to help them overcome an array of challenges facing the legal system. Among the most serious of these challenges are the following:


*Limited resources: Court systems are strained to the breaking point as they take on more cases with fewer prosecutors, clerks, judges, and employees. At the same time, they must operate under conditions of increasingly tight austerity. The result has been a huge backlog of cases.


*Overuse of paper: The vast majority of court systems are still paper-based. For example, judicial systems in the United Kingdom generated a million pages of documents a day-365 million pages a year-before moving recently to a digital justice platform.

There are huge costs and inefficiencies in producing, transporting, and storing such quantities of paper. Preparing a bundle of documents for trial, and then making copies of the bundle, requires significant staff time. It’s also difficult to move pages and add new material if additional evidence comes to light.



*Transparency: In many jurisdictions, paper-based procedures create opportunities for corruption. Charge sheets and other documents may be tampered with, or simply go missing. Missing documents may result in cases being thrown out before the guilt or innocence of the defendant is determined.


*Remote working and real-time collaboration: Using digital technology, attorneys and judges can access information remotely, including online legal documents, case bundles, case libraries, and up-to-date schedules of hearings, as well as communicate and collaborate in real time.



The main objections to remote courts, so far, have been framed as threats to open justice and procedural justice. It has been argued, in short, that remote hearings are insufficiently transparent and indeed are not fair hearings. I think it balanced to conclude, from the research thus far, that most judges and lawyers who have actually participated in remote hearings do not share these concerns. Experience of using the systems in practice has often changed views.



"My thinking about the future of courts has always extended far beyond video hearings. We are just warming up."


Conclusion
The rise of digital justice offers courts the ability to serve justice with greater efficiency and transparency, at lower cost, while making justice more accessible to all. For the courts themselves, for attorneys, plaintiffs, defendants, and other participants in legal cases, and for a society dependent on a stable, well-functioning legal system, digital justice promises to be a welcome transformation indeed.


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