originally published in Lawyers Weekly
Do Canadian court websites do anything well?
Faced with this question, Patrick Cormier audibly hems and haws. “The only thing I can think of is that they all have contact information,” he finally said, “and often a welcome from the chief justice.”
“I’ll get back to you,” Dominic Jaar replies with a laugh of resignation.
Jaar, CEO of the Canadian Centre for Court Technology (CCCT), wants to provide better answers to this question one day, so he founded a CCCT working group to modernize Canadian court websites.
Cormier, whom Jaar appointed to lead this group, brought people with diverse backgrounds on board to achieve the group’s ultimate objective: guidelines that any court can use to create more serviceable websites.
“Having guidelines to establish a court website will help different jurisdictions standardize their websites,” says Louis-Vincent d’Auteuil, a lieutenant-colonel and military judge with National Defence, Government of Canada.
“Guidelines will help all courts better approach website creation. And people can go from one jurisdiction to the other and find similar information in similar ways.”
“If you visit certain Canadian court websites, one thing is very obvious – most of them have a very old look and feel,” Cormier says. “They look like the first generation of websites, coded using HTML.”
“Web 2.0 dominates everywhere else, yet when you look at court websites, there’s no interactivity of any kind.”
“They’re all boring,” Jaar adds. While he admits this concern may seem superficial, he explains further: “They reflect the impressions people have about the justice system. It isn’t very appealing; it’s something you would rather stay away from.”
A clearer criticism is the condition of content court websites offer. Calling the information available a “mishmash,” Jaar notes that jurisdictions rarely present all the information people seek: rules of court, names of judges, calendaring solutions, schedules and so forth.
On thing that lawyers, primary users of court websites and, thus, the working group’s primary clients, want to find: official court decisions that are posted quickly after said decisions are rendered.
“Right now, courts rely on traditional publishers to publish material of precedential value,” Cormier says. He neither discounts the value those publishers add, nor does he believe courts will enter the legal publishing business, but “courts can take responsibility to issue decisions publicly and quickly,” he adds.
Subscriptions (like email and RSS) would also help. “People might like a notification service to help them stay informed about new decisions,” adds d’Auteuil. This service need not be difficult to create: Jaar points to Philadelphia’s setup, which alerts the public about newly published decisions using Twitter.
Members of the public who choose to self-represent don’t always find the information that they need to do so using court websites, an understandably obvious place for people to look.
“A user cannot expect anything from a court website,” Jaar says. “We want to standardize content, see it in logical places across jurisdictions.”
While the group has its own ideas about what court websites should offer, it also plans to learn what people currently want from court sites. “Why do search engine users land on court websites?” Jaar asks, explaining that his group will use the answers they find to drive development of content and features.
One item Jaar believes: people can interact more with courts using electronic court services.
“Right now, to schedule a court appearance, I need to show up at the courthouse with my lawyer, ask for a date, wait while everybody checks their calendars, it takes an hour to go there, an hour to come back, all to spend ten minutes there to set a date.” Jaar envisions a system whereby people sign in using a name, password and case number to accomplish this and other administrative tasks.
Jaar also presumes that entrepreneurial law firms will be able to “mash” such services into their own websites to
Law enforcement organizations can also jump on the bandwagon. Several jurisdictions, for instance, already enable drivers to settle certain traffic infractions online. Other minor types of cases could be settled via the web, which would presumably reduce court and administrative workloads.
The same reasoning applies to certain aspects of more complex cases; for instance, the accused in a criminal trial may plead not by showing up in court but by clicking options on a website.
For all the great ideas pouring forth from this group, the initiative faces its challenges as well. For instance, except for certain larger jurisdictions, most courts don’t have webmasters, “so they ask one clerk’s uncle who runs an internet business to develop a website,” Jaar says, “but the developer doesn’t know the court system’s needs.”
To tackle this problem, the working group wants to develop a template that enables court administrators to handle their own jurisdictions’ websites.
Given the type of information people may handle online, privacy naturally come into play. For example, while full access to court records through the years appears to be a good idea, could a minor conviction, since pardoned, still appear on the web 20 or 30 years later when the pardoned individual seeks a new job?
Even if the record is not available from official websites, the web’s indexing ability “can completely override pardons,” says Cormier. “Once information is on the Internet, it’s hard to take it back.”
Interactivity, a clear boon to the web in many cases, could prove a double-edged sword. Consider the case of a published decision that allows comments. Having lawyers comment on that decision could prove beneficial. But should the judge who rendered that decision add comments too?
Potential obstacles aside, Jaar reports enthusiastic responses from people who have learned about the proposed guidelines. “There’s lots of pressure to get this done tomorrow,” he says.
The group clearly won’t meet that deadline. Aside from the vetting needed for an initiative of this scope, each of the group’s members is a volunteer, taking time out from their day jobs as lawyers, judges, law librarians, academics, IT managers, consultants, journalists and law students.
To lighten the load, Cormier plans to invoke “intelligent laziness.” Certain services, such as Ontario’s court booking system OSCAR, are already online, and he sees these services playing a part in other Canadian court websites.
“I prefer to not reinvent the wheel,” he says. “If something has been done well elsewhere, let’s adopt it.”
CCCT Guidelines
The CCCT court website working group is about to publish a first draft of its guidelines. To provide an idea of what’s coming, Patrick Cormier, the group’s leader, published the following major guideline headings in January on slaw.ca, and he advises people to follow his slaw.ca posts as events unfold.
- Context – It’s a Brave New World: Features & Characteristics of Modern, Forward-Looking and Interactive Websites
- Issues – Some Complexities Underlying Court Websites
- Principles – Cutting Through Context and Issues: What Principles Should Guide the Design of Court Websites?
- Guidelines – Applying Principles to Design: What You Need to Know
- Tools – Need Help in Following the Guidelines: What You May Want to Use
For a PDF of this article, click Justice_On_The_Web_CCCT.