Peer to Peer Magazine

PEER TO PEER: THE QUARTERLY MAGA ZINE OF ILTA 66 In spite of the United States' prominent role in technological innovation, when it comes to electronic filing and the promise of paperless trials, we lag behind other countries. The U.S. Supreme Court, for instance, is only now developing an electronic filing system, expected to be operational in 2016 (noted in a PCMag article by David Murphy). However, official filing of documents will still be paper-based, at least for a while, after the system is introduced. While the report "Courts Plunge Into the Digital Age" states that e-filing is making some headway at the state level, very few courts can claim to be approaching the paperless ideal in the near future. The collective caution of the U.S. legal community regarding e-litigation continues, despite the affordable, infinitely scalable and user-friendly technology already being used in this country and abroad that makes electronic litigation not only possible but demonstrably practical. PAPERLESS TRIALS ABROAD One example of a country ahead of the game is Singapore, which launched its Electronic Filing System (EFS) as a pilot in 1997, and introduced mandatory e-filing in 2000. There were problems with the transition — law firms had to reserve specific computers for EFS, for example, and required technology upgrades were expensive. But even at that early stage, Singapore's Court Registry benefited immediately from faster access to case documents, the ability of judges to download cases and the use of electronic copies of documents in court. Singapore has since replaced EFS with E-Litigation, a Web-based system launched in 2013 that eliminates the need for smartcards and card readers, requires no installation of software on local computers, and uses dynamic electronic court forms instead of PDFs for many documents. Apart from streamlining in-trial processes and dramatically reducing the mountains of paper that still burden courts in other jurisdictions with unnecessary expense and inefficiencies, Singapore's E-Litigation provides litigators with full access to all case documents for as long as a case remains active. It allows Collaborative Technology and E-Litigation in U.S. Courts FEATURES attorneys to easily collaborate with clients during the trial by sharing important documents electronically as necessary. It can even generate email messages or SMS alerts to remind attorneys of impending obligations, such as hearing dates. In the United Kingdom, a 2011 trial between two Russian billionaires, Roman Abramovich and Boris Berezovsky, attracted widespread attention for its innovative use of cloud-based electronic trial bundle technology that simplified the management of court documents in an extremely high- volume, complicated case. The contract dispute, valued at $9.7 billion and billed as the most expensive private litigation ever brought before a British court, generated a trial bundle of over 5,000 e-discovery documents in multiple languages, 449 expert reports, 49 applications/motions, 43 real-time court transcripts, 27 sealed orders and 23 pleadings — to cite just a handful of measures that indicate the scope of the proceedings. More than 100,000 pages were scanned, machine-encoded via optical character recognition and uploaded to a cloud-based online workspace accessible to all parties over the course of the trial as an alternative to ringed binders. Instead of having to print and copy separate sets of documents for the trial's five parties, and for the trial judge and witness, legal teams could have the files uploaded into the virtual workspace, where they were organized exactly as they would be in hard copy — in series and

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