Local Government Lawyer Insight July 2017 LocalGovernmentLawyer 12 The future of some of the most vulnerable children is decided in the family courts. Cases brought by local authorities tend to be complex and involve decisions about whether a council should become legally responsible for a child under a care order or a supervision order. Sometimes it is necessary for a court to make an emergency protection order if a child is judged to be at risk of immediate harm by remaining with their parents. The decisions made by judges in family courts will often change course of a child’s life. This makes it imperative for justices to have all the facts and information about the child’s circumstances in front of them. Each family court case can have four or more hearings, requiring up to seven copies of the bundle of paperwork – for the parents and children’s guardian, and justices. Collating, copying and indexing all the evidence in paper form is very time consuming and it is easy for a mistake to be made which could affect the outcome of the case, for example a crucial document being added to the wrong section of a bundle or filed inaccurately. Although this paper-based process is the way Her Majesty’s Courts and Tribunals Service has always worked, family courts have been some of the first to recognise that relying on a manual method is no longer an efficient way to work in an increasingly digital age. Family courts have been some of the first to pilot digitised courtrooms which many would argue is the logical first step towards online courts. The digital court in action Given that the judiciary has taken centuries to evolve into the legal system we have today, the first online courts are likely to take a while to go live. As yet, there is no clear definition of what an online court would look like but it could be similar to Skype, Facetime or Google hangouts. But in the meantime Digital Courtrooms are bridging the gap by combining the physical court building with electronic evidence. This revolutionary system makes it easier than ever before to create electronic court bundles that are automatically indexed and paginated, reducing the margin for error. Once the bundle is ready it is sent securely and digitally to the court prior to the hearing. Hearings take place in a courtroom and all the people involved in the case and their representative attend in person. However, submitting the evidence digitally, in advance, benefits everyone - giving them all the chance to read documents before the court hearing, which means more cases start on time. On the day in court, extra hardware including laptops, tablets and television screens may be taken into the court room to assist with presenting the evidence. These paperless court rooms have been pioneered by the South London Legal Partnership – the shared legal service of the boroughs of Merton, Sutton, Kingston, Richmond and Wandsworth. Council lawyers set up a pilot project with two companies – Zylpha, which specialises in creating electronic bundles, and Project Fusion, which developed its online data room platform to transfer information securely. This was tailored to the requirements of the Digital Courtrooms project, enabling all the documents in each court case bundle to be kept in one place. For the first time, this allows lawyers to prepare for a case in advance online where they can have access to all the documents at any time which are protected by the latest security technology. Zylpha’s software makes it possible to update and repaginate bundles of court documents in a matter of minutes. Previously this could have taken many hours on the paper-based system. Distribution of the evidence is done online using encryption, eliminating the need for couriers and the expense and security risks of biking or mailing documents between lawyers’ offices and the court. The pilot has had the full Paul Phelan reports on the South London Legal Partnership’s digitised courtroom pilot scheme with the Family Court, a first step towards the development of online courts. Making connections