E‐Justice Conference, 13 October 2014
Lord Kerr (UK) input for session on ‘e‐Justice and e‐Law in Supreme Courts across EU’, Monday 13 October
Welcome to the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom.
We are here in Court One, the largest of our courtrooms. As you can see, there is a
reasonable amount of room for the storage of papers: but for reasons of cost, efficiency and not least the environment, we are keen to encourage the parties – and indeed the Justices of the Supreme Court – to become less dependent on bringing large volumes of papers with them to court.
In order to facilitate this, our Practice Directions stipulate that every party to a case has to lodge a ‘memory stick’ containing their core bundle and all the relevant decided cases and statutory material upon which they wish to rely. This is formatted as a PDF document, and each page is numbered to allow for ease of navigation during the oral hearing. We insist that parties cite both the electronic bundle page numbers and the hard copy page number (if different) in court.
On a sitting day, most of my colleagues would arrange for their laptops to be set up in court ready for them to use in the course of the hearing. All we have to do is ensure that we have copied the PDF onto our laptop before the hearing begins.
I have mine here to demonstrate to you how we use the basic Adobe software in order to navigate through electronic bundles, and to annotate them. Firstly, we can quickly navigate to a page simply by entering the number given to us by counsel. If you can see there is a small panel in the top of the screen. When counsel refer us to, for example, page 340, we simply enter ‘340’ into that little panel and it brings us to the relevant page. Secondly, we can make comments on any particular section, or highlight it with a specific colour – my practice is to use a different colour for the different counsel. On the right hand side of the screen you can see various annotations that I have made – if I click on one of the
annotations it will take me to the page that I have highlighted. Red in this instance is the colour I have chosen for the respondent, but I choose other colours for other parties.
We have also equipped our courtrooms to enable ‘virtually paperless’ hearings to take place. Flat screens have been installed by each Justices’ chair on the bench, operated by a central computer situated on the solicitors’ bench. This enables counsel to direct attention towards a particular page, and for the parties’ operator to rapidly navigate to that page without the need for the Justices to do so. This facility is particularly helpful in appeals that involving very many papers, most of which are not necessarily going to be referred to during the oral presentation of the case. We cannot make notes on the networked flat screens, but we can of course do so on our personal laptops which many of us take into court.
Before we leave the courtroom, I should of course also point out that the very cameras you can see me through now are used every day when the court is sitting. These cameras create
video footage which, along with the core volumes, form the official record of proceedings.
This means we do not need to have stenographers or transcribers in the courtroom during our hearings. We also live stream all our hearings online via our website, and make footage available to broadcasters and educators on request. More than 15,000 people each month tune in to watch our proceedings. And now you have joined them!
