Can technology democratize justice? Sure, there’s the modernization angle, but could it speed things up and create more efficiency? Could something, like AI, augment decision-making, overcome logistical constraints and streamline processes in the pursuit of justice? Can virtual courtrooms be the new norm long after the COVID-19 pandemic? Can there be greater consistency and accuracy in legal outcomes? What does it take for technology to reshape legal systems to continue to uphold the principles of justice?
And what changes should the courts in India and the US be subject to from a technology perspective?
According to Padmaja Chakravarty, Global Legal Head – Trade Finance and Working Capital Solutions at Citi, “I think the journey of the use of technology in the US and India is a little different with one predating the other. But, the idea is to create transparency, fairness, access and timeliness in the delivery of justice; that’s what the power of technology is trying to do. I think the difference lies in the prioritization: budgets and resources are finite; how they’re prioritized depends on a country’s goals.”
Chakravarty adds, “In the US, the focus area of technology is the security of information and there’s a large budgetary ask for amping up cybersecurity here. In India, the prioritization comes from the inflexion point of the economy. India is all set to become a trillion-dollar economy, driven by commercial enterprise and economic growth and is expanding due to diversity of geography and penetration in rural areas. This inflexion point is driven by the use of the Internet and smartphones and access to payment infrastructure. To get to a trillion dollars, we’re going to make sure that commercial enterprise reaches across and access to dispute resolution has to commensurately expand, which can only happen with the use of technology”.
And are the courts a physical location or a place?
According to Josephine Staton, US District Judge of the US District Court for the Central District of California, “For the foreseeable future, it would have to be both. Maybe, there’ll be a time when AI takes over and no physical location is needed, but we’re not there yet”.
And 10 years from now, how could the justice system be transformed by the forces of technology?
According to Ann Aiken, American attorney and jurist in Oregon in the US, “I don’t know where it’s going to go a decade from now, but the youth has to drive us there. There may be some arrogance of the judiciary, who think they’ve learned it all; it’s about intellectual curiosity and having more students brought into our chambers to teach us… I use technology and give lawyers the opportunity to do work without calling them into court every single time… In the last 4 years, I haven’t been in a courthouse. I’ve done everything remotely and on Zoom. It’s not perfect, but it has moved the docket and moved things ahead, so I know it’s possible. I know there are critical and important times when you have to be in the courtroom, but we have to use resources in a strategic manner”.
And what’s the diversity that technology can create in the legal landscape?
According to Sabrina McKenna, Associate Justice of the Hawai’i State Supreme Court, “In the US, there’s the Federal Court and the State Court system. In some ways, the State Court systems have always been and continue to be laboratories, where different things are tried that the Federal Courts do or don’t do. In Hawai’i, we’ve started an online ADR for small cases. We have court rules being proposed to us to discern what kind of hearings or circumstances would Zoom be allowed as a platform. The use of Zoom and smartphones creates access to justice for so many people. The issue becomes a digital divide. We have to make sure everyone has Internet access and smartphones, but it does open up a real world, where people don’t have to travel to get to court or pay their attorneys to get to court”.
McKenna adds, “When you don’t have that human element, it affects credibility. According to a study, in Cook County in Illinois, bail amounts were much higher when done remotely, which led to the remote system being abolished. Court filings are all becoming online, but we have to be concerned about cybersecurity issues because there’s a lot of confidential information”.
Douglas Tookey, Judge for Position 13 of the Oregon Court of Appeals, remarks, “We used to have paper briefs. Now, we have an iPad. A lot of technological advances, in terms of how we do things, are driven by lawyers. Technology can help judges do a good job”.
And could technology create tectonic shifts in legal education?
According to Camille Nelson, Dean of the William S Richardson School of Law at the University of Hawai’i, “We have to look at the resources that have to be allocated in a constrained world. When making hiring decisions, we need to prioritize diversity, as biases can be ingrained in programming. If there’s discrimination presently, why would we think anything is gonna change just because the modality is flipped to a digital platform? It’s not going to change, unless biases are addressed in coding and programming. When we talk about programming for bias, we’re talking about the people doing the programming for bias. We know, generally speaking, those who are in charge of technology are fairly homogeneous, so we need to talk about racial and gender diversity. I’d like to postulate that we should imagine different ways à la Star Trek a 3-D version of students in the same way and in the same way, a 3-D version of plaintiffs. The future is coming. Are we ready for it?”
Watch the entire interaction here:
