Two comments caught my attention.

Apparently we have a corrupt judicial system!

At p. 62

Two projects
This section examines two justice IT projects: the HBS project in the
Netherlands and the Ontario Integrated Justice Project in Canada. Both
projects were stopped before completion. These projects are relevant
for four factors they have in common:
– They attracted a lot of attention.
– They illustrate a variety of learning points.
– They were audited by a third party, so there is an authoritative
source for what happened. The audit reports are an important source of information for this section:
The audits, by the Ontario Auditor’s office, of the Ontario Integrated
Justice Project. These audits were conducted in 2001 and 2003 (Ontario 2001, 2003).
– They are no longer active projects, so their outcomes are known.
There are many very interesting judicial IT projects in progress right now. Any of them would have been interesting for this study.
However, they are difficult to judge because they are still in midcourse and their outcomes are not yet clear.

During my time at the World Bank, I was told time and again that the only way to ensure a favorable judicial decision is to bribe the judge. This impression is difficult to test, because corruption is extremely difficult to verify empirically. In 33 of the 62
countries polled for TI’s Global Corruption Barometer, a majority of respondents describe their judiciary/legal system as corrupt. This group includes all countries in Africa and Latin America except South Africa and Colombia. In the United States, the percentage of respondents describing their judiciary/legal system as corrupt is about 55, and it is 33 percent in Canada. In Asia, the percentage for India is well over 70, and for Pakistan it is around 55. However, for Singapore, Malaysia, Hong Kong and Thailand the percentages are lower than 25. Eight of the ten countries with the lowest percentages are in Western Europe.

Dory Reiling
Technology for Justice
How Information Technology can support Judicial Reform

Technology for Justice examines impacts of information technology (IT) on the administration of justice. Court users all over the world complain mainly about long delays, lack of access to justice and court corruption. Drawing on a broad variety of sources – comparative studies, statistics, case law and jurisprudence, studies on IT use and on court usage – this study examines how IT can help to remedy these complaints. The study, contributing to knowledge about information use and IT in proceedings, analyzes how automated case registration systems have revolutionized thinking about case management and significantly reduced court disposition times. It also explores Internet technology’s potential for increasing access to legal information, predicted by Richard Susskind in 1996, as a means for selfhelp with settlement and support for court access. Providing the first systematic analysis of court corruption, it analyzes IT’s contribution to reducing corruption. It closes by providing insights into the Internet’s new challenges for judiciaries.

Dory Reiling, judge at the Amsterdam first instance court, was formerly the IT policy officer for the Dutch judiciary and a senior World Bank judicial reform expert. Her previous publications include Doing Justice with IT (2006) and Justice Sector Assessments Handbook (2007).

One plea here to the Superior Court judiciary (and I don't mean to single out or put pressure on Mr. Justice Granger – I am merely taking advantage of his post to "comment" on the following request):

The law librarians of Ontario would be ecstatic if the Superior Court would issue a practice direction welcoming (or merely allowing) the use of online forms of judgments for books of authorities where the online version is reliable, has paragraph numbering, etc. (see my earlier SLAW blog post here from January 2008 on this topic). If online versions are good enough for the Supreme Court of Canada and the Ontario Divisional Court, one would think they should be acceptable to the Ontario Superior Court (and Provincial Court, for that matter).

While I understand that some lawyers (and likely some judges) may prefer the more professional format of a judgment from a published, print case law reporter, using reliable online versions is often much easier (and the formatting of online judgments is improving). Most firms have some litigators who continue to say "the judges require a print version" (or words to that effect). A practice direction allowing online versions would help deal with those types of comments.

Some progress has been made in the meantime, sometimes formally and sometimes informally (as with Justice Granger's Ottawa case and elsewhere). It is tempting to try to 'integrate' again – though perhaps not in the same way as last time!

Judge Dory Reiling, Vice President of the Amsterdam District Court, http://j.mp/4yzmBI , has just published her dissertation on this topic, entitled Technology for Justice: How Information Technology Can Support Judicial Reform (2009), abstract: http://j.mp/4zIDoU , and writes a blog about this topic, http://doryreiling.blogspot.com/ , which may be of interest.

It would also be interesting to look at how expectations are changing as the tools of justice become less paper-based. Is Ontario going to have to come up with a centralized registry, or a PACER-like system so that we can find filings more easily? I would argue that continuing with the existing, segmented approach just doesn't make sense.