Technological Challenges Facing the Judiciary

Abstract

Compared to other highly skilled labour markets, the legal profession has been slow to adopt technological changes, but lawyers have been downright speedy compared to courts. Courts already generate voluminous amounts of data, but restrict access to it. The private sector, recognizing how legal data can help its clients, willingly incurs the costs to gather this data and develop proprietary tools to analyze it. As this trend continues, access to justice will worsen, further benefitting wealthier clients over opposing litigants as well as the courts, for no other reason than that courts will lag in their ability to efficaciously decide judicial matters. The judiciary-across all levels-could reverse this trend. The first step is to develop a more robust institutional framework for making court data publicly available. The second step is a willingness among courts to analyze this data when issuing decisions, both procedural and sustantive. Doing so requires courts to develop core competencies in existing and emerging legal technology. Democratizing access to judicial data will diminish the advantage currently enjoyed by affluent litigants, but accrue to the benefit of everyone else-including courts themselves.