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As well as looking out, we need to look in.

I am a lawyer by training, and every day I run an Australian court, but I am not a judge. My daily work is very different to the daily work a judge does, for all the superficial similarities. Both of us impose solutions. Our solutions usually destroy any remaining trace of a relationship between the litigants, but sometimes we can only lance the boil, to release some of the pus which has built up in a bad relationship which cannot end.

I turn over large numbers of cases at high speed so that judges have time to concentrate on the other cases, such as murder trials, the cases that demand more than the quick fix that is all I have time to apply before the next case is called on before me. I have yet to see the murder trial where there is no deepseated human need for ritual, a need I have no time to fill.

The technology I need is quite different to the technology a judge needs. Working the raceway gate in a cattleyard is ideal training for a magistrate, for it involves sorting out the problems presented by large warm blooded creatures that can easily become dangerous if they are not quickly and carefully handled. The magistrate who makes a mistake in court has no rails to run up.

I need IT that deals with the needs of a person who needs a limited amount of information provided as possible with as little preparation as possible, and I need IT that stores and traces multiple pieces of information and multiple people. I need IT that handles quantity and IT that enables me to cut time in many cases. In IT terms, a magistrates court is a router, switching information packets at high speed.

A judge deals with multiple pieces of information under the umbrella held up by the same two parties. He has many pieces of information to contend with, but there are connections between them. He needs quality information. Without it, the connections will fall apart. His task is to preserve them. Often, he needs a database.

We are both conservative in the Machiavellian sense: we are not going to depart from that which has been done before unless something has happened which makes us feel compelled to do so. But when we talk to IT people, we are talking to people from an industry which is essentially innovative, an industry where nothing is impossible.

When we say we give judgments where we identify the facts, resolve facts in dispute, and apply the law, it means nothing to a person with an IT background. It is a description of a form we follow in order to meet the purely human needs of the person who has lost a case, the need to know that he was not brushed aside, that we did hear what he said, and the need to know our reasons for disagreeing with him.

We will need to understand what the IT advisor and the judge mean when each uses the word "proof". The IT advisor comes from a scientific background, where proof is internal consistency consistent with all known external factors. The judge talks of proof in a context where two internally consistent hypotheses are competing with each other.

Perhaps we could point out the Online Ombuds Office (obsolete link) to our colleagues in IT, and we could to say "look at what Professor Katch and his colleagues have explained, and look their diagrams. We deal with disputes. This is how disputes are resolved".

I

INTERIM REPORT TO THE NATIONAL CENTER FOR AUTOMATED INFORMATION RESEARCH

An Online Ombuds Office on the Internet

Ethan Katsh and Janet Rifkin, August 26, 1996

"One interesting possibility of what is occurring here is that we are being contacted at a somewhat earlier stage than a similar office might be consulted in the physical world. The disputing process usually follows a pattern in which problems arise but assistance is not sought until, for a variety of reasons, the problem becomes too great to ignore. One way of viewing the Online Ombuds Office is that we lower access costs in the sense that we are more convenient and less intimidating to enter than some physical offices. It may be, therefore, that we are visited at an earlier stage than physical offices are visited by disputants. If true, this is a very intriguing circumstance, since it might change the pattern and process of traditional intervention. Some possible effects might be the following:

1. The ratio of persons coming to the office to those actually seeking assistance might be different, since something that seems to be problem at an early stage may turn out not to be a problem.
2. If we are actually consulted about a problem, we may reach parties whose positions have not yet hardened.
3. We may get more disputes but the disputes will be more varied in terms of how eager the parties are for intervention and the kinds of intervention skills that might be called for. "

Copyright image; thank you, Professor Katsh,
for emailing your permission to use it in this
paper.

We need to explain the problems we face, and to develop means to deal with each of them.

The myriad of files a magistrate creates in a month of different matters can be sorted out fairly efficiently by setting up folders or directories. But they need to realise they need these folders, and to set them up.

The needs in the case of the Estate Mortgage litigation were quite different: multiple parties, multiple pieces of evidence. As best I could tell, MSAccess was fitted to the need, just as Lotus Notes met the different needs of the High Court.

One problem we have not yet seen confronted is multi jurisdiction litigation. The San Diego court which has the breast implant litigation is using the WWW to disseminate information. If proceedings are also instituted in Australia. Canada and England, will the defendant build a separate system for defending the case in every country? It is inherently unlikely.

We have not even come to grips with it ourselves. For most litigation, every state is a different country, for most litigation is in the magistrates courts and there is no cross vesting here, even if it survives at Supreme and Federal Court level.

Perhaps we could look at ways of using virtual courts to sit together at once, to resolve disputes which are interstate or transnational. It is the power to enforce which limits us to any particular set of political boundaries.

The substance of what we do is what others suddenly need to know. What we sow is what we will reap. The more we put in, the more we will get in return.