1992

1993

Importantly, the facilities described above are duplicated on a separate secure LAN servicing the Judiciary and support staff of the District Court. Furthermore, a Lotus Notes (Domino) Intranet server, using the latest in Web based technologies, has been established providing Magistrates’ with similar applications (primarily, Supreme & District Court Unreported Judgments, Statutes (SWANS), Electronic mail and Diary facilities).

The Judicial Support System runs over a Windows NT Local Area Network (LAN) supported by a Lotus Notes (Domino) server and can be categorised under the following major components:

The Judgment Processing system is designed to provide the secretaries, as well as judges that type their own judgments, with structured and standard procedures for the creation and delivery of all judgments in the Supreme Court. The system is completely integrated with Microsoft Word for Windows for the production of the judgments and has an inbuilt tracking system for judgments after they are delivered in Court. Once delivered, judgments are then processed and converted into a format that is suitable for loading into the Unreported Judgments (Decisions) Lotus Notes database.

The Judgment Processing System is fully automated and requires no involvement from IT staff. Once the secretaries deliver a judgment, they are check for consistency by a court staff member and then automatically transferred to the Decisions Database.

The Unreported Judgments (Decisions) Lotus Notes database is a major research tool for the Judges. This database contains copies of all judgments of the Supreme Court from July 1991 until the present day. The database provides the Judges with full text searching capabilities on the coversheet of the judgments as well as the facility to search on the entire text of all judgments. It also provides the facility to print judgements in their original form.

The Lotus Notes Decisions database is Internet enabled and will be distributed throughout the Ministry of Justice to authorised users using the Ministry of Justice Lotus Notes Intranet. This database will also be published on the Internet to the public.

The Statutes database is a compilation of the public general Acts and Regulations of Western Australia based on the index of statutes published by the government printer. The compilation has been made in the Parliamentary Counsel's Office from records kept by that office. Method of access is via the Titan database but a development project is currently in progress to convert this database to Lotus Notes.

All judges in the Supreme Court are able to request electronic copies of the transcript of any hearing that they are presiding over. The electronic transcript is provided to the Judge using a Lotus Notes database. The Judge has the ability to query any part of the transcript, in a structured or unstructured way. Comments and issues are able to be entered by the Judge against any paragraph of the transcript and various reports are available that provide information such as lists of witnesses and exhibits, as well as summaries of the comments that have been entered by the Judge.

The Transcript database also supports the retrieval and display of imaged exhibits.

A modified version of the Judges' Lotus Notes Transcript database is used when electronic transcript is required to be shown in a courtroom environment. The Supreme Court currently has three courtrooms configured to be able to display electronic transcript. The Judge's Associate controls a PC that is used to access the electronic transcript. The output from this PC is then displayed on several monitors that are placed throughout the courtroom, giving everyone in the courtroom the ability to view the page of transcript.

The In-Court systems also caters for the storage, retrieval and display of imaged exhibits, using Lotus Notes to record details of the exhibits and either the Kodak Imaging software or Lotus Notes Document Imaging (LN:DI) software to display the images.

Lotus Notes Mail has been installed on the Judicial Network for the use of all users of the network. Electronic mail has proved extremely beneficial for all users, especially with the Supreme Court being located in more than one building. It is being used by Judges for communications between other Judges and their own secretaries and is used extensively by the secretaries for co-ordination of their work, in particular the production of judgments.

A number of the Judges are currently using Lotus Organizer as their electronic diary tool.

With the recent implementation of Lotus Notes Mail, all Judicial Network users are in the process of being given access to the fully networked Diary facilities of Lotus Notes.

All users of the Judicial network have access to Word for Windows Version 6.0 or Version 7.0. Aside from the Judgment Processing System components, there are many templates and macros available to standardise and automate the process of producing day-to-day documents for all users on the network.

A logical extension of the aforementioned facilities has led to the development of a pilot Electronic Appeal Book system. The system has been developed utilising the Lotus Notes technology and preparations are underway for it’s use in the first appeal selected.

The system provides electronic access to transcript and exhibits, and to the judgment being appealed and all associated appeal documents, such as Grounds of Appeal etc. All portions of a normal Appeal Book are delivered to the Court in original electronic form. An electronic Appeal Book database is then created from all the source material and distributed to the Judges presiding on the appeal and back to the parties involved in the appeal. This database is also made available to the courtroom network, for use in court during the appeal. The Judge’s associate controls the courtroom display system with a PC. Only pages or exhibits retrieved by the associate can be displayed on all the monitors strategically placed throughout the courtroom.

Each user of the database has a common navigation function that provides the ability to proceed directly to a page of transcript, a page of the judgment, a page of a given appeal document, or to view an exhibit. The database also provides a full-text searching capability over the transcript, judgment, and appeal documents. It does not provide a full-text searching capability over the exhibits, unless they are processed through an Optical Character Recognition System. The transcript portion of the database provides an annotation facility that enables the user to highlight text in the transcript as well as attach comments to the transcript. These annotations are considered private and are not available to other users of the database. The system also provides a bookmark utility that enables the user to group together a number of documents that relate to a particular topic. All parts of the database are able to be bookmarked in this way.

Each user involved in the appeal will be provided with their own copy of the database, if they so wish. This enables the parties to use the database prior to the commencement of the appeal, without the need to be connected to the Court’s network. The Lotus Notes replication facility is used to ensure that any updates to the original database are provided to all users, automatically.

A key component of the facilities described within the Applications Suite of the Judicial Support system is the consistent and standards based approach in deploying each application using the Lotus Notes suite of products. This has greatly assisted in providing a common user interface to each application accessed by users on the Judicial LAN, minimising training overheads - inherent within any project required to deliver such a diverse range of facilities. From a technology perspective, the uniform adoption of Notes across the LAN has provided a seamless integration of all applications forming the basis for the production of the Electronic Appeal Book. Further, the flexibility in customising applications is an option at the discretion of users in consideration of Lotus Notes’ full-scale development environment. The adoption of pre-packaged or purpose built software, conducive to legal use and research, has been specifically avoided for the very reasons described above.

Proposed developments are intended to build on and exploit the present suite of applications residing on the Judicial Network (LAN) and specifically include:

• Full scale implementation of the Electronic Appeal Book (incorporated within the Electronic Courtroom environment);
• Judges Benchbook
• Judges Induction Manual;
• Full GUI implementation of Statutes (SWANS) database (Acts & Regulations);
• Sentencing Database providing sentencing principles and patterns and;
• Media Neutral Citation of Judgments (paragraph numbering) and;
• Extend facilities to the District Court Judicial Network and the Magistrates’ Intranet facility.