While on Twitter I recently came across Mari Moreshead who does "client services and community management" for CourtCanada.com. I had never heard of CourtCanada and so checked their website and asked if I might interview her for the purpose of reporting back to Slaw readers.
CourtCanada was started in 2006 by former bankruptcy lawyer Gregory Azeff who is the company's President and Chairman of the Board of Directors. CourtCanada is currently comprised of two services:
InSolve – a bankruptcy case management system, first beta tested in February 2007 and released in final version January 2008. For cases in the Ontario Superior Court of Justice (Commercial List), law firms involved are often given the responsibility of hosting the documents related to the bankruptcy case. This has been less than satisfactory in the past as firms often do not have space created on their websites for this purpose, and the documents end up being hidden from public view. InSolve creates a place specifically for this purpose. There are currently documents from four bankruptcy cases posted on InSolve. I hope to see this used more, as it is a great way to have all of these materials centralized rather than scattered across law firm websites.
OSCAR – Online System for Court Attendance Reservations – originally released in October 2007 as a pilot project in cooperation with the Ontario Superior Court of Justice in Toronto; it is expected to expand to other courts in the near future. This system allows litigation clerks to schedule hearings online without having to contact the courts. It also provides the courts with an online administrative system for the purposes of scheduling and reservations. Moreshead showed me the back-end, and it was quite easy to use. As well, part of the system is accessible to those without subscriptions so that we can search for hearings or search for a court date. This service represents a huge time savings to both law firms and to the courts.
I was impressed with how well thought-out these services are, and won't be surprised if other courts look to work with CourtCanada. My only suggestion to them would be to incorporate some RSS feeds to allow others to monitor new documents added to the system.
They have been largely flying under the radar up until now. If your firm hasn't been contacted by them already, I would encourage you to get in touch with them.
Hi Connie:
I was also going to mention them. They were a exhitibor at the Canadian Law and Technology Forum and gave a brief presentation at one of the panels. Although there initial focus is on hosting/managing documents on bankruptcy cases, it was mentioned that they may be developing capacity/technology/procedures to do similar work on all types of court files.
I continue to bemoan the poor online access to court dockets in Canada, although we are slowly see some improvements. However, it will be sometime before we have the equivalent of a CourtLink/Pacer system (which I was just in to retrieve US filings).
Yes, I was delighted to find a local start-up company taking on what the courts ideally should be doing. I look forward to hearing more from them in the future.