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You are here: BAILII >> Databases >> United Kingdom Judiciary Speeches >> Lord Justice Brooke : "The Information Society, the Judiciary and the Courts" [2002] UKSpeech 0FZSE (23 May 2002)
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Lord Justice Brooke
Judge in charge of Modernisation

"The Information Society, the Judiciary and the Courts"

A lecture given at the University of Hertfordshire, St Albans

23 May 2002

IT Mania

  1. Over the Easter holiday I read a book by John Cassidy. It was called "dot.con". It is the story of "dot com" mania in the United States. It was a bit like tulip mania in the seventeenth century and the South Sea Bubble in 1720. Ridiculous claims were made about the benefits of a new information super-highway. Investors parted with a lot of their money in exchange for shares in the new dot.com companies. Then the bubble burst. A lot of people looked pretty silly.

Public Sector IT Disasters

  1. In this country we sometimes read about disasters in public sector IT investments. A recent example involved the scrapping of a complicated system commissioned by the Immigration Service. A lot of public money was wasted. Civil servants processing thousands of new asylum claims did not receive the support they needed. The delays in processing these claims grew and grew. A lot of money has also had to be written off in connection with other big Government schemes.

The Historical Context

  1. It is against this unpromising background that I am talking to-night about the Information Society, the Judiciary and the Courts. Later on, I will describe some of the practical applications of modern technology which I think are likely to help us in the conduct of court business. But I was brought up as a historian, and I do not think it is sensible to consider where we are now or where we may be going, without first considering how we have got here.

Binary Digits

  1. In very simple terms, computer technology is all about the manipulation of a couple of digits, 0 and 1. We can leave the technical details to the experts. All we need to know as lay people is that when text, or sound, or images, are translated into this binary digital form, they can be moved about within a computer, or from computer to computer, with incredible speed.

Expert Systems

  1. Clever programmers can use computer technology as a means of developing artificial intelligence. Twenty years ago I remember being struck by the early chess programmes by which one played chess against a computer. Depending on the way it was programmed, the computer was allowed increasingly small periods of time to think about its next move. I could normally beat it at Level One, where it had to respond almost instantaneously. At any higher level it tended to beat me every time. Some so-called expert systems were written for lawyers more than ten years ago. Nothing much came of them. I believe that one day they may provide a lot of help for lawyers, but they have not really arrived on the court scene yet.

Word Processing and Information Retrieval

  1. Computers can also juggle words around. I first came across word-processing at a big City firm in the mid-1970s. I thought it was magic. I have used it ever since. They are also very good at searching for words or numbers, or combinations of words and numbers. I remember attending a launch by Butterworths in 1978 of its link up with the LEXIS legal information database in Dayton, Ohio. This seemed pretty remarkable in those days, although for various reasons the take-up was quite slow.

Communications software

  1. The first time I came across applied technology in any major way in my legal practice was in 1983. In that year I was appointed Counsel to the Sizewell Inquiry. As soon as I joined the Inquiry, I remember being struck by the way in which the official transcripts of the Inquiry were being transferred digitally from the transcribers' computers to the CEGB's computers at Snape Maltings, in Suffolk, and then sent digitally to computers at the CEGB's headquarters in London. Their lawyers and senior staff in London could read each afternoon the transcript of what had been said 100 miles away at the Inquiry in the morning.

Fax Technology

  1. A little later I encountered fax for the first time. In 1984 I first saw how fax machines could translate manuscript writing into a form in which they could be sent down the telephone wires. They would then be reconstituted at the other end. This revolutionary technology enabled the teams in London (or wherever) to exchange draft documents with their lawyers in Suffolk without them all having to travel to the same place for a meeting, and then communicating afterwards by posting letters to each other.

Investigative Systems

  1. Another aspect of the magic on display at that Inquiry were the applications which enabled an operative in the control room of a modern nuclear reactor to interrogate the plant systematically when a fault of some kind became apparent on the computer screen. This scene in a modern English control room was a far cry from the chaos in the control room at Three Mile Island in 1979. There the half-trained operatives of a small private US utility were confronted by so many flashing lights and ringing alarm bells that the only way they could obtain space to think was by turning all the safety devices off so that they could get a bit of quiet time to think. Objectors pointed out that systems designed by human beings could not be relied on to be 100% dependable all the time, particularly as they were not designed to cater for the unknown. Of course they were right, but it was equally right to make all the use one could of applied modern technology to lessen the risks involved in using what was potentially very dangerous modern plant.

The Bar in 1985

  1. All this made me wonder what modern technology could do for legal practice. When I returned to the Bar in 1985 I returned to a different world. The prevailing culture among lawyers had an antipathy to technology. When our Bar Computer Committee met for the first time that year, we sent a circular to all 360 barristers' chambers in England and Wales, asking them whether they would be helped by receiving clear guidance about practical applications of IT. If they said "yes", we asked them what form that guidance should take. 50% did not reply at all. Another 25% replied politely to the effect that they could not imagine any way in which IT could help them. And above that level there were various degrees of polite interest up to the very, very few enthusiasts who were already networked and knew it all.

Accounting Systems

  1. At that time most chambers accounts were maintained on manual card index systems. Barristers' fee notes were typed out by hand. When consultants visited the vice-chairman of the Bar in 1987, they looked into his clerks' room and asked the senior clerk what was the total amount of unpaid chambers debts. The senior clerk said that he had no idea. He imagined it was about a million pounds. These unpaid debts did not carry interest. In those days the Bar concealed the effects of its inefficient working practices simply by charging higher fees. There was no incentive for early payment.

Work Stations and Electronic Filing

  1. I remember we had a barrister employed by Rank Xerox on that first committee. He had a work station at work, and he regularly exchanged draft documents from all over the country with other Rank Xerox lawyers and senior managers. Our first chairman, Christopher Bathurst, was also the director of a newspaper company. His company used IT quite extensively for communications between its various works. He could not see why information could not be sent in the same way between lawyers' offices and an electronic file at the local court. This would save all the cost and delay involved in using the methods of communication then in use. This was a language which most of those in the Lord Chancellor's Department in those days did not begin to understand.

Enabling systems and videolinks

  1. When we met the members of the Lord Chancellor's Civil Justice Review in 1986, we told them we believed that there should be investment in IT systems at civil courts which would enable judges to manage all the business at their court efficiently. They accepted our recommendation, but the Government did nothing about it. In a different forum we discussed with the Home Office the merits of a San Diego video-link project for remand hearings, linking a court with the local prison. It was popular with prisoners in San Diego in 1986. It has been popular with English prisoners since it was introduced here two years ago.

Nothing new except the Internet

  1. I am telling you all this to show you that there is nothing very new about the processes we are now at last beginning to see in our courts. The one invention we did not anticipate was the Internet. Its arrival helped to move things along a bit.

Falling behind over countries

  1. Between 1986 and 1999 this country steadily got further and further behind countries like the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. We also got behind a number of European countries who were making big advances in the use of technology in their courts. The Lord Chancellor's Department was a small Government department. Legal aid spending was out of control in those days, and it was not allowed to invest in IT. While the Treasury allowed other Government departments to invest quite heavily in IT during the 1990s, the courts missed out badly.

Four success stories: CBPC, CREST, CASEMAN and JUDITH

  1. We did not completely stand still. Those years saw four major advances. A computerised bulk process centre at Northampton now handled the claims of a handful of major organisations electronically. A Crown Court system called CREST enabled back-office staff in the Crown Courts to do their work more efficiently. Similar arrangements called CASEMAN were introduced five years ago into the county courts for much the same reason. And a judicial technology project called JUDITH provided about 400 full-time judges with laptop computers and software, including communications software, to go with them. Apart from a few freestanding back office systems in specialist courts, and a communications system for civil servants, that was about all.

1999: A change of attitude

  1. We couldn't go on ignoring technology for ever. New senior managers joined the Court Service who knew a lot about technology in the modern world, and they insisted that we should have a good long look at all our court processes. By this means we could see whether these processes could be made simpler and more straightforward if computers were used for the things they are good at.

The court modernisation programme

  1. The result of all this thinking has led to the court modernisation programme of today. I am a member of the new Programme Board. This is the first time a senior judge has ever served on a Government Board of this kind. This means that the judges are at long last close to the place where spending decisions get taken. I lead a team of five judicial advisory groups which are helping with different aspects of the programme. It aims to introduce modern IT infrastructure into all our courts. At the same time we are examining different ways of conducting court business: ways which would be impossible to contemplate without modern technology.

Civil and family business centres

  1. Far and away our greatest need is to introduce software systems which will enable court staff and judges to manage court business better in the civil and family courts. Today the courts are not networked. CREST and CASEMAN link dumb computer terminals with a court database, but we are miles behind most government departments and modern private sector businesses. Our aim is to lop off the business sections of the civil courts, and to enable those courts to concentrate on their real purpose: hearing defended cases. The back-office business will be diverted to new business centres, linked to the courts by IT. The first of these business centres will start on a pilot basis in the Midlands this autumn.

Enabling Applications

  1. In the autumn we also hope that testing will have begun for the new software systems we will use in future in all our courts. At present we rely on paper filing systems. It is not always easy to retain and motivate staff when files go missing, or get into a muddle quite so often. Nowadays court users have every reason to complain about some of the delays and inefficiencies that occur. Once modern software is in place, court staff and judges with case-management responsibilities will be able to handle cases far more efficiently before trial than is possible today. A modern electronic diary and listing system will enable trial dates to be fixed more quickly and judges' time to be more effectively used.

In-court technology: XHIBIT

  1. I will now talk about some of the applications of technology we are now trying out in court. If you go to the Chelmsford Crown Court, you will see a new information system called XHIBIT in action. This system has been developed as a result of discussions between the different criminal justice agencies, all of whom have an interest in knowing the progress a Crown Court trial is making. Witnesses need to get to court at the right time, and not have to hang about there for ages. It is helpful if police officers who have to give evidence in a case are not taken away from their other duties for too long. Those who are concerned in the next case in the list have an interest in knowing whether the current trial is running to time. And so on.

The logging arrangements

  1. XHIBIT is a web-based system which depends on someone in court keeping a log of events which are then transmitted instantaneously to the XHIBIT screen. Prosecution opening speech; Prosecution lay evidence; Police evidence; defence evidence; closing submissions by the prosecution; judge's summing up; jury in retirement; verdict. These are some of the entries that may be made.

Information screens and text messaging

  1. The information on XHIBIT is accessible on monitor screens in the public parts of the court building, and also on the particular Crown Court website, which is accessible by everyone who has an interest in the progress of the case. Text messages can also be sent to people who need to be warned when to attend court. After a successful launch at Chelmsford, its use was extended to two other Crown Courts in the Essex area. It will soon be tested at Liverpool, which is a much bigger centre.

Money Claims Online: the origins

  1. Money Claims Online (MCOL) was formally launched three months ago. It came about in the following way. For about ten years a number of very big organisations have been using the centre at Northampton to enforce payment of their debts through an electronic process. All through the 1990s this centre used to receive their unpaid final invoices by post. It would then issue and post a county court summons electronically. When the debtor did not respond to it within the prescribed period, the centre would issue and post a default judgment to both creditor and debtor. The execution process could then be issued electronically. More recently, the users of this service could send their final invoices to the centre by e-mail.

Court business by computer

  1. This facility did not only provide an efficient service for enforcing the payment of unpaid debts. It also took away from the courts a large quantity of undefended business of a routine kind which could be processed just as easily by computer as it can by judges or court staff. Of course, when the debtor shows resistance, the action is processed through the appropriate county court as a defended action in the usual way.

The modern online claims service

  1. MCOL is the logical next step forward. It is available to all of us, provided we have access to the Internet and to a credit card. At any time of the day or night a creditor can fill in the form for a money claim and send it electronically to the Court Service for processing. The different boxes on the form have to be completed. The information in them will then provide the Court Service computer with the data it needs to issue and post the claim to the defendant named on the form. The claim will not be issued until the court fee has been paid electronically. The amount of the fee, and the amount of costs that can be claimed, appear on the form once the requisite details have been completed.

The take-up so far

  1. 3,600 claims have already been issued in this way in the three months since the service was launched. We were expecting a slow take-up at first, but this will pick up as the usefulness of the service becomes better known. The next step is for facilities to be added by which a defendant can file his or her defence online if the claim is disputed.

Electronic presentation of evidence (EPE)

  1. For some time now, courts have been using the electronic presentation of evidence ("EPE") in major criminal trials. Anyone visiting the Maxwell trial, for instance, would see two monitor screens. The first would show the raw Livenote transcript scrolling up a few seconds after the words were said in court. The other would generally show the witness's face (because it was a very large court). If use was made of the facility to show a document on the screen, everyone in court could read the document, too.

The use of zoom facilities

  1. Zoom facilities enable the operator to highlight features of the document which a party wants the jury to see, such as the signature, or the manuscript writing on a document. Experience has shown that juries like this kind of presentation. It also saves a lot of court time. If any of the parties want the document printed and put in the jury bundle, this can easily be done.

Computer graphics

  1. This facility will also enable a party to make a complex case easier to understand by using computer graphics. In big fraud cases, where money is said to have whizzed about through a number of bank accounts, it is very much easier to demonstrate its movement graphically than by the use of the spoken word. In the United States EPE is common. Increasing use is being made there of computer graphics to illustrate features of a case which will provide a knock-out blow if they can be put before the trial court.

A US example of EPE

  1. There was once an American case concerned with a catastrophic fire in a hotel ballroom. The fire was said to have started in an anteroom, and it then passed at speed through a hotel lobby on the way to the ballroom. The owners of some sofas in the hotel lobby escaped liability when their lawyers could show that the fire must have passed through the lobby at high level at such a high speed that it would not have even touched the sofas on its way. We were shown the graphics at a London conference ten years ago, and their message was irresistible. The flammable attributes of the sofas could not possibly have been to blame.

Testing the data

  1. In a case like this, everything will turn on the accuracy of the data put into the computer. Experts will have considered all the relevant evidence - about the heat of the fire and about the time when it was seen in different places, for instance - before they prepared the graphics. The real battle between the parties will not be fought at the trial (where the pictures are dynamite) but at the pre-trial case management conference when the admissibility of the evidence is put under challenge. The judge will then have to consider whether it was fair to rely on the data used in compiling making the graphics.

EPE in criminal trials

  1. Over the last ten years there has been increasing use of EPE facilities by the prosecuting authorities in very big trials. The courtroom is specially fitted up with the necessary hardware and cabling, and the judge and the lawyers are taught how to use it for the purposes of the trial. Tiresomely, each of our major prosecuting authorities use different software, and in due course decisions may have to be made as to whether this is a sensible way of going about things.

Visual presentations

  1. In American courts it is now becoming very common to demonstrate the effect of evidence by the use of Powerpoint or other similar technology. Those who use it know that the eye takes in information much more quickly and efficiently than the ear does.

EPE: The pilot courts

  1. We are now tackling the introduction of EPE in a systematic way. Since the modernisation programme started two years ago, nine Crown Courts have been earmarked for trials of this equipment: Birmingham, Blackfriars, Bristol, the Old Bailey, Kingston, Leeds, Liverpool, Manchester and Southwark. We are now considering the wiring systems for the roll-out of IT infrastructure into all our major courts. Decisions will soon have to be made as to how many criminal and civil courts will be able to accommodate EPE as a matter of course without special arrangements having to be made.

Video-conferencing: a recent case

  1. Earlier this year there was a case in which a woman paralysed from the neck downwards claimed she had the mental capacity to understand what she was asking for when she wanted her doctors to turn off her life-support systems. The President of the Family Division, Elizabeth Butler-Sloss, went with court staff and the lawyers in the case to the claimant's bedside, where the proceedings were recorded by video for the benefit of those sitting in the trial courtroom. When the case continued in court, the claimant could watch the proceedings from her hospital bed. At the very end of the trial the technology was used to enable the judge to give her judgment from Birmingham to the lawyers sitting in court in London.

Videoconferencing: the pilot courts

  1. During the modernisation programme three civil court centres, at Cardiff, Leeds and the Royal Courts of Justice in London, have been equipped with video-conferencing facilities. Two others, at Manchester and Birmingham, have paid for it out of their own resources. Experience is showing its value for a number of different types of case. For trials it is being used where a witness is abroad, or is seriously disabled, or is a long way away from the court, and it would be disproportionately expensive for him to travel there. It is also being used for pre-trial hearings where one of the party's lawyers is a long way from the court where the hearing is being conducted.

Video links with prisons

  1. In criminal courts video-conferencing is also increasingly being used for links with prisons. A successful pilot experiment between three magistrates' courts and one Crown Court and their local prisons has led to the facility being extended to magistrates' courts throughout the country this year. This technology has also been used for some time for the evidence of child witnesses, and foreign witnesses on fraud cases. In July there may be quite a big extension in its use when different forms of vulnerable and intimidated witnesses are permitted to give evidence in a criminal court by video link.

Video evidence: the lack of immediacy

  1. Experience has shown, however, that unless the equipment is very good, the evidence of a witness over a videolink does not have the same immediacy as when the witness gives evidence in court. Some criminal judges believe that juries have acquitted in cases where they might well have convicted if they had actually seen the complainant child witness give evidence from the witness-box. There is no doubt, however, that video technology is here to stay for certain types of young or vulnerable witness, and we must do our best to ensure that the technology used is as good as possible.

Equipping the Judges

  1. Since January 1999 over 1,200 of our full-time judges have been equipped with modern laptop computers and associated software. Three days' basic training was also provided. Over half our judges are now using computers in their daily work with increasing confidence. Over 1,000 have quite regular access to our electronic conferencing system. One of the challenges we now face is in helping all our judges use their equipment with equal versatility. It has proved to be particularly valuable in providing a means of instant advice to judges in remote areas who are confronted with a tricky legal problem, no library facilities and a couple of lay litigants in front of them who know no law.

Access to Human Rights judgments

  1. We faced a problem when the Human Rights Act was due to come into force. There were not nearly enough copies of Strasbourg caselaw for all the courts in England and Wales which were expected to apply it. This led to the development of online services for judges by which they could access the whole of the Strasbourg database from their laptop computers. At the same time judges were also provided, through a contract with Butterworths, with access to a great deal of Butterworths online material. This included their statute law database and the All England Law Reports, and access to the complete set of Law Reports going back to the 1870s.

The value for outlying courts

  1. This service, too, is valuable for judges based at court centres with poor library facilities. It is not easy for a judge to comply with his duty not to violate the Human Rights Act when he has a litigant in person on one side and an incompetent lawyer on the other, and no books at the court where he is sitting. Applied technology is now available to meet his needs.

Faster access to judgments

  1. Over the last few years a lot has been done to make it easier for everyone to have speedier access to the judgments of the higher courts as soon as they are handed down.

The House of Lords

  1. The House of Lords led the way in this. They created their own website six years ago. Ever since then the speeches of the law lords have been published electronically at about the same time as they are delivered in the chamber of the House of Lords. They face an easier task, however, because the law lords decide fewer than 100 cases each year, and arrangements were already in place for their speeches to be printed and distributed to the parties and those who want to read them. It was not a far step from there to post them on a website.

Automatic strike-outs: chaos in the courts

  1. In 1997 we had more than a hundred appeals under Order 17 Rule 11 of the County Court Rules waiting for a hearing in the Court of Appeal. This was a rule which provided that an action should be automatically struck out if no request had been made for a hearing date within 15 months of the action being started. The rule was fine for simple actions involving one plaintiff and one defendant and no pre-trial disputes, but for anything much more complicated it led to chaos, because the rule-makers simply hadn't thought things out properly.

Tackling the backlog

  1. I was a member of a three-judge division of the Court of Appeal which was appointed for a seven-week period to get rid of this backlog. We were given the services of a very able judicial assistant, and with his help we looked at all the reported and unreported cases in the Court of Appeal which had dealt with this rule already. We identified 70 different points of dispute for which a solution had not yet been found. We then decided to hear 21 of these in the first three weeks of our seven-week stint, and we would then produce a single judgment designed to solve as many of the unresolved problems as possible. We hoped that most of the other cases in the queue would then settle when the parties could see what the law was. The plan worked, and by the end of the seven weeks we had cleared off all the appeals which were ready to be heard.

How to distribute a long judgment quickly in 1997

  1. I mention this because we had to find some means of letting everyone have access to the first judgment as quickly as possible. The Court Service website was then in its infancy, and we posted the judgment on the web at the same time as we handed it down in court. But we knew that in May 1997 none of the courts and very few lawyers' offices had access to the web. We therefore had to direct that hard copies of this long judgment should be sent to every civil court centre in the country, for copying to all the judges at the centre, and to all the parties to the appeals in the waiting list.

The value of rapid publication

  1. I don't know how much this exercise cost. Through modern eyes it was a very inefficient way of doing things. But it did mean that from the beginning of the following week no judge or deputy judge decided any case involving an automatic strikeout without having our judgment available, and the parties in the queue also had our judgment, too. There were a few more unresolved points we had to decide during the following four weeks, when we issued another much shorter judgment explaining all the decisions we made in that four week period. That one was published on the website too.

The printed reports followed later

  1. The All England Reports published both our judgments that September. I remember being struck by the fact that they weren't published by the official law reporters in the Weekly Law Reports, and then in a shortened form, until long after the immediate crisis was over.

The inefficiency of our arrangements

  1. One of the reasons I have mentioned this was that this experience showed both me and Lord Justice Saville (as he then was) just how inefficient our arrangements were for letting everyone have access to important judgments as fast as possible. Another is that it introduced me for the first time to the work of the Australasian Legal Information Institute (AustLII). If you read our judgment in Bannister v SGB plc you will see that we refer to it with admiration at the start.

The Australasian Legal Information Institute (AustLII)

  1. The pioneering work of AustLII was based at two Australian universities. AustLII was founded on the principle that everyone should have access to the law of their country free of charge. By the law of a country I mean not only statute law and statutory instruments but also caselaw. If you visit the AustLII database you will have immediate free access to masses of statutes and to the judgments not only of the courts in Australia but also of important tribunal jurisdictions. By the use of complex software large quantities of new material can be integrated into the database very quickly by automatic processes.

The English scene in 1997: a comparison

  1. In those days in England, we had to wait for a short summary of a judgment in The Times law reports before we knew anything about a case. We would then have to wait very much longer until the case was reported in a printed report. Until this happened, a favoured few had access to an unreported judgment because they were lucky enough to be involved in the case. The judgment would then be scanned onto the firm's database, or the chambers intranet system, and be available to those who had access to those databases, but to nobody else. This seemed to me to be thoroughly unfair. We were providing one facility for the rich, and another for everyone else. It was also a very inefficient way of doing things, because judges would be deciding cases in ignorance of decided Court of Appeal authority already touching on the point. Appeals were therefore inevitable.

Publishing judgments on the Internet: some problems

  1. It has been a long struggle to get to where we are now. We have not yet solved all the problems, because there are some types of judgments over which private firms of transcribers own rights, and these we cannot publish immediately. This state of affairs produced an odd result recently when Lord Woolf gave an oral guideline judgment on sentences for robbery involving mobile telephones. The Press and politicians were commenting on his judgment without having access to the words he actually used. If they had been able to read his judgment in full, they would have expressed themselves differently. On the other hand, if he had delivered a written judgment, nobody would have had any excuse for misrepresenting him because the judgment would have been available to everybody on the court website.

Some Solutions: formatting and neutral citations

  1. This is one matter in which I believe modern technology is capable of producing great benefits. In recent years we have required all our judgments to be produced in a standard format. We have also introduced official neutral citations, so that it is easy to link a reference to a judgment with the judgment itself. We have introduced paragraph numbering, which makes it easy to find our way round judgments even if they are drawn down from the web with different page numbering, because different people use different formats and different font sizes. It also means that if we add the words "at [51]" after the citation we will not only provide a cross-link with the judgment itself if it is on the same database. We will go straight to the passage in the judgment which is being cited.

Judgments: rapid conversion for the Internet

  1. . Because all our judgments are now formatted the same way, through the use of a common template, we can use a macro, devised by a member of the Bar, to convert them automatically from the Word 97 word-processing language to the hypertext mark-up language (html) which is needed when a judgment is posted onto a website. Last year I watched the Court Service's website team spending ten minutes manually picking away at the codes of our judgments to make them easier to handle on a website. Now they should be able to post them directly with no manual handling at all.

Networking the Royal Courts of Justice: the benefits

  1. This is important, because within the next five months the whole of the Royal Courts of Justice will be networked, so that we can post all our High Court judgments of any interest on the website just as easily as we now post our Court of Appeal judgments. The quicker they can be handled, the more useful the service will be.

The British and Irish Legal Information Institute (BAILII)

  1. In my spare time I am chairman of the trustees of BAILII, the British and Irish Legal Information Institute. Lord Saville is another of the trustees. Our ambition is the same as AustLII's, and we have received generous help and advice from AustLII's directors, who have allowed us to use their software. These are very early days. The pilot site was started in Australia two years ago. Last year we had raised enough money to appoint a full time member of staff to organised things at the London end, and we have just advertised for a technical member of staff who will be able to help with the process of transferring the technology to England.

BAILII: The service expands

  1. Those of you who use the site will have seen that in recent months we have been posting many more cases there. Once we have more staff, we will be able to provide a much better service. We hope to add important tribunal decisions as well, and many more judgments from courts like the Administrative Court and the Commercial Court. I know how much this service is appreciated by law centres and small firms who don't have the resources to equip themselves with large libraries. It is also becoming better known in the university world, and we are getting a lot of appreciative letters from there, too.

Internet publication: the good side

  1. The good side of all this is that we are creating a level playing field, and those of us who are interpreting the law in the higher courts are being supplied with up to date copies of unreported judgments relevant to the points we are deciding. This has been very valuable in these early days of the Human Rights Act, where we have so much to learn from each other. The law would be in chaos if our early decisions were being made in ignorance of what another court had been saying on the same point.

No artificial restrictions on publication

  1. As a matter of policy, we are determined not to place any artificial restrictions on the availability of judgments. This has been happening in the United States, where the policy has come in for a lot of criticism from academics, who do not think judges should decide which of their judgments should be published and which should not.

The bad side: information overload

  1. The bad side is that we often suffer from information overload. Cases are cited to us which decide no new point of law, and which merely illustrate the application of familiar law to a new set of facts. We published a practice direction last year to try and bring things under some sort of control, but very often lawyers can't recognise a principle of law when they see one. We are getting steadily more and more overloaded with citations of cases which frequently don't help us in the task we have got to do, but which just add to the paper we have to read.

Judgments: Available to everyone

  1. Another great blessing of modern technology is that when we post an important judgment on a website at the time we are handing it down in court, we know that it will then be communicated electronically throughout the country the same day to everyone who has a "need to know", and this does not only mean lawyers.

Immediate access to the law for those who need it

  1. In the second half of last year I was involved with cases like Callery v Gray and Sarwar v Alam, in which we were explaining the effect of the arrangements for success fees and after the event insurance which have taken the place of legal aid in personal injuries litigation. I was also involved with Hatton v Sutherland, where we were concerned with liability for occupationally-induced stress. On each occasion I know that our judgments were sent electronically through a lot of different information networks on the day they were delivered.

Access for the media

  1. This does not only mean that people immediately know what the law is. It also means that press comment is more likely to be accurate, because we are treating the Press like adults. We often publish a short Press Notice the day before an important judgment is delivered, and with the judgment we issue a short summary, or an index, to make it easier for the Press to see what the judgment is all about.

The modernisation programme: a summary of progress

  1. As I have said, I am a member of the board which is driving this modernisation forward. In the last Government spending review we were allocated more than a hundred and sixty million pounds for the first stages of this programme. In July, when the results of the next spending review are announced, we will know how quickly we can take the programme forward over the next three years.

Modernisation: the priorities

  1. The immediate priority is to install a networked IT infrastructure into all our Crown Courts and up to 90 of our largest civil court centres. The next priority is to choose, design and install the applications software. With what money is left over in the current spending round we could also extend the use of EPE and video-conferencing. There are distinct possibilities, too, in digital audio recording. Trials of this technology are being conducted this year in Crown Courts at Bournemouth, Doncaster and Snaresbrook.

The management of change

  1. I began this lecture by describing the culture of the Bar in 1985. Things have changed since then on both sides of the legal profession, and nearly all our judges have been supplied with a modern laptop computer and received basic training in its use. But is would be absurd to think that many judges or lawyers year feel comfortable when using computers. This is the great challenge of the next ten years. In the hand-out I prepared for this evening I wrote about "training to meet the challenges posed by resistance to change and the fear of the unknown".

The need for leadership

  1. When I went to a court technology conference in Baltimore last August I learned that leadership is vital. In this country the leaders of the Bar and the leaders of the solicitors' profession must understand why this modernisation programme is so important, and must get this message through to those they represent. So must the leaders of the different agencies whose work impacts on the work of the courts - the Court Service, the police service, the Crown Prosecution Service, the prison service and so on. There will have to be investment in IT, to keep up with what the courts will be requiring of those who use them. There will also have to be investment in training and confidence building.

Privacy

  1. I know that people are anxious about privacy. If access to a court file is available, it can be searched far more quickly and effectively than a paper file. Some jurisdictions impose blanket bans on public access to certain categories of electronic files: criminal cases and family cases, for instance. In others, where the right to freedom of information is better recognised, more sophisticated means are found for trying to protect information on a file where there is a genuine public interest in protection. In the early days I am sure that we will be over-cautious.

Lay people and the information age

  1. Litigants in person also pose a major set of challenges. I know the Court Service is endeavouring to build partnerships with advice agencies, like the Citizens' Advice Bureaux to help to mitigate some of the problems facing lay litigants in an electronic age. At Baltimore a black Harvard law professor told is that the widespread use of IT may help the educated, but it also tends to disadvantage still further those who are already disadvantaged. I know that many judges are very worried about this. One of the benefits of moving forward slowly is that we will be able to spot where the problems lie in practice, and do our best to take practical steps to resolve them.

Interesting times ahead

  1. We have travelled a long way since 1985. Over the next years the pace of progress will accelerate. It is very difficult to see how tomorrow's lawyers can succeed unless they feel comfortable with the use of computers. If they do, they will be able to render a service to their clients in a modernised court environment which will put into the shade the puny efforts of my generation. But they must always remember that the practice of the law is the practice of serving the needs of other people, and serving their needs requires many human qualities over and above versatility in using modern technology. Very interesting times lie ahead.

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