AIJA Technology for Justice 2000

10 October 2000

By Jennifer Lazberger

Manager, Chief Justice’s Chambers

Hotel Sofitel

Melbourne, Victoria

I would like to take you back to the year 1290AD England. The world was still thought to be flat. The Crusades were being fought in the Holy Land. King Edward I had been monarch since 1272AD. The Chief Justice of the Common Bench was Chief Justice John of Mettingham and the records show that only about 300 cases heard prior to 1290AD had survived in reports.

Judgments pre-1290 AD were not known for their accuracy. There were occasions when judgments were published with wrong details such as who the Judge was, the judgment published might have been the record of actual transcript of the hearing and might not even include the Judge’s final decision and then judgments were also written for the purpose of teaching law.

Edward I’s reign of 35 years between 1272 and 1307 is considered to be one of the greatest and he was responsible for reshaping the organization of the law courts and rewriting the then land laws. It was also during the second half of Edward I’s reign that the practice of law reporting was finally established. This occurred partly because the common law courts became separate bodies from the Parliament and Council. This meant the Courts were responsible for their own records and procedures.

Luckily for us today judgments are still not written in long hand or in French or Latin. So the challenge the Courts face today is how to ensure today’s judgments are accessible for tomorrow.

In July 1991 the Supreme Court of Western Australia under the leadership of the Hon Justice Paul Seaman, as he then was, embarked on bringing the Court into the information technology age by capturing all judgments in electronic form and validating them into a decisions database. This enabled the user to search, retrieve and print judgments from that date.

Over the years the development of the judgment processing system known as JPS and decisions database has been user driven to ensure the requirements of the judiciary have been met. These systems have now become the basis for the judicial support systems at the Court.

The introduction of media neutral citation with paragraph numbering gave the Supreme Court the opportunity of reassessing our current JPS and decisions databases. As the Court already had a highly developed electronic judgment processing system and an electronic decisions database it was considered feasible to redevelop and redesign a new JPS which incorporated the latest technology, the recommendations of the AIJA’s Guide to Uniform Production of Judgments, 2nd Edition as well as to include media neutral citation with paragraph numbering.

After discussions regarding our requirements of the new JPS it was decided to utilise Lotus Notes and Word for Windows software. Lotus Notes enables us to organise and integrate the marked-up or tagged Key Information items which are concealed within the electronic version of the word processing judgment into a word processing document as well as fully automating the paragraph numbering in the simplest way for the users.

The new JPS involved changes in policy and procedure. At no stage did this project look beyond the coversheet information. The substance of the reasons for judgment is still totally at the discretion of the judicial officer.

A collection of judgments had been sourced, endeavouring to obtain examples of every conceivable layout or variation that a coversheet might have. These judgments were used as the basis for the creation of the template for new judgments. This process also allowed the Court to establish strict standards regarding what appears on the coversheet and, more importantly, what should not appear on the coversheet. The AIJA Guide to Uniform Production of Judgments was used as a guide for this exercise.

There are two major efficiencies achieved by this new system.

The first is that there is only one judgment template for all the judgments at the Court which resides on the judicial network. Under the old JPS there were eight different judgment Word templates which resided on every individual PC. When a change needed to be made an IT technician had to attend to every individual PC and Notebook and manually update the template. Now when a change is required the Administrator simply e-mails the users advising of the changes and asking them to exit Notes and open it again to receive the changes.

The second major efficiency has been developed for appellate judgments. In order to share the responsibility for the preparation of judgments one member of the appeal court will be nominated whose staff will be responsible for the processing of the draft judgments of members of the Court into the combined reasons for judgment to be delivered in Court and entered into the electronic database. Only the Nominated Judge's Secretary enters the information in Lotus Notes. When the other Judges on the Coram are ready to have their judgment prepared their secretary will recall the coversheet from Lotus Notes and select "New Draft" and select the Judge for whom the secretary is creating that judgment for. This will now create the judgment in Word for that judge. Access to that draft judgment will be in the usual manner as a Word document.

To start a new judgment Lotus Notes will ask for three key information data items namely:

Case Type;

Case Number; and

Case Year.

Displayed on the screen is the template that is used for a new judgment to be created. This judgment is a single judge civil with only two parties to the action. As can be seen the following information is then keyed in and where possible the user utilisers the drop down lists for standardised information.

The relevant parties details and their counsel details are also entered at this early stage. I am only showing the details of the applicant being keyed in but the same procedures are followed for all parties and their counsel to the action.

Once this information is entered the judgment has become unique to that case and the system will not allow the same information to be entered again.

The database will generate the citation by selecting the "Citation" button. The citation has now been generated but the citation number will not be allocated until the judgment is in final form.

The judgment is now ready to be saved.

Once saved Lotus Notes gives you a new function line and by selecting "New draft" all the information that has been inserted in Lotus Notes will produce the coversheet in Word .

Here the coversheet is being generated into a word processing document. It builds the coversheet by showing the tagged information items. This process also attached the word processing document to the Notes database.

It then informs you the coversheet has been created. The draft reasons are now ready to be prepared.

The coversheet which has been created in Word has all the "tagged" Key Information Items as hidden text at this stage. This information can be checked to ensure accuracy at any time by pressing the "show/hide" button in Word.

Word will automatically number the judgment and place the draft judgment into the appropriate Judge's or Master's directory. The draft reasons for judgment is now ready to be prepared.

The Judicial Officer who is the author of the judgment will at all times have electronic access to the draft judgment.

Within the judgment template are a set of standard format styles. The format styles must be used when preparing the judgment. This will ensure consistencies are maintained within and between all judgments. It is also the format style which notifies Lotus Notes which paragraphs require a paragraph number.

When the judgment is ready to be engrossed or final copy prepared the catchwords are typed into the database. There is automatic indexing for "cases referred to in judgment/s" and "Cases cited" and they are both inserted in Lotus Notes.

The draft judgment is now ready to be "Prepared" for delivery.

The final stage of preparation is to select the "Deliver to Court" in Lotus Notes. The judgment is being re-generated in Word. This process also amalgamates all the judgments being delivered by each of the appeal Court Judges and allocates the next citation number. Being shown here is a CCA judgment with three judges on the coram. This function re-generates the judgment in Word and changes the selected format styles to "Media" style and allocates paragraph numbers where applicable. The judgment is now in final form. The judgment is checked for accuracy and is then ready to be printed and photocopied.

After the judgment has been delivered in Court the Nominated Judge's Secretary will deliver the judgment to the Decisions Database.

I have tried to give just a brief demonstration on the JPS. In the normal work environment the judgment generation, the regeneration and the delivery to court process literally only takes seconds to complete.

Validation process

After a judgment has been handed down in Court a secretary will validate the judgment into the Decisions Database. This is a simple process that usually takes less than a minute and ensures the hardcopy and electronic copy are both the same.

When the judgment has been validated the system automatically e-mail judgments to authorised locations.

At the completion of the validation process the reasons for judgment documents are stored on the Supreme Court Judicial Network in the Decisions Database. The Decisions Database is replicated every 30 minutes to the other courts and to the PLEAS server.

PLEAS the "Practitioners' Electronic Access Service" was designed in 1996 to provide timely, cost-effective, easy-to-use access to judgments of the Supreme Court to legal practices, the Bar, Crown agencies and the public. It is accessed through a paid subscription dial-up service where the database is down loaded to the subscriber’s own computer system. This is replicated from the Supreme Court Decisions Database.

It is the aim that all judgments are available on the Decisions Database within 24 hours of being delivered in Court. This deadline is constantly achieved.

Decisions Databases

That now leads me to the Decisions Databases.

We currently have three main decisions databases on the Supreme Court Judicial Network. They are:

High Court Decisions since 1994;

Supreme Court Decisions since July 1991; and

District Court Decisions since March 1996.

Databases have also been developed for the Family Court of Western Australia, the Children’s Court and some of the State’s Tribunals using similar processes and procedures.

All decisions on the databases are linked to Adobe Acrobat which will convert the judgment from the database into a Portable Document Format or PDF file. This means the judgments can be printed in the form of the original judgment delivered in Court. All parts of the judgment can also be copied and pasted into any word document. This is a function the secretarial staff utilise extensively when typing quotes from previous judgments.

Each Database has a set of standard search headings as can be seen here on the left. You can simply drill down to the relevant judgment if you know the name, number or any of the judgment’s details. The judgments will be listed in either alphabetically or by most recent cases depending on the search heading used.

Here the advance search is being used to search for "drug offences" in catchwords.

By selecting the Normal Search Button the database searches across all the Supreme Court Decisions and presents us with 30 cases with the words "drug offences" in catchwords.

Simply select the judgment you wish to review.

Seen here is what the judgment looks like in the database. Scrolling down you come to catchwords where "drug offences" appear. The rest of the judgment follows.

After reviewing the selected judgment you can copy parts of it into a word document, print the complete judgment via Adobe Acrobat or close the judgment. When you close out of the judgment Lotus Notes will take you back to your search list where you can repeat the process or undertake a new search.

Lotus Notes is able to create an accurate party index, in particular to individuals. This was not possible in the old format as Word was not sophisticated enough to know and be able to distinguish between first names and surnames. When creating a judgment the Secretary will identify the first name/s and surname of all individuals in separate fields. Procedures have also been put in place to cater for the circumstances where the first part of an individual's name is the surname followed by their Christian names, so that the surname will appear in the party index.

The database is also capable of greater advanced search capabilities if the user choses to use a more defined search selection.

We are currently refining our Legal Reference Search Key which will enable the user to search across all Decisions Databases as well as the Current Legislation Database. So if I was to search for "manslaughter" it would give me High Court Decisions, Supreme Court Decisions and any legislation referring to manslaughter.

The Court is also currently integrating the JPS with other databases where information is automatically taken from the relevant database and inserted directly into draft judgments. This is being done by the user keying in the relevant case or legislation and the database inserting the information into the word document. The JPS will also be integrated with the Court’s future case management system.

The JPS and Decisions Databases are under constant periodic review and we have experienced great success in the development of our systems by involving or consulting all users at the relevant stages. The other important reason for our success has been due to the strong support from Chief Justice Malcolm and the Judges in supporting the development of our systems.

Today’s judgments are produced by a radically different process from those delivered back in the thirteenth century but the necessity to record the judgment in final form has not changed. I would like to think we are successful in preserving today’s judgments and in the words that are carved on King Edward I’s tomb in Westminster Abbey "Pactum Serva" - "Keep Your Word" is what we are doing by ensuring today’s judgments are here for tomorrow.