Electronic trials (eTrials)
Supreme and District Court
Overview
An eTrial can be conducted in any Supreme or District Court in Queensland. In an eTrial, all documentary evidence is submitted as scanned images in fully text-searchable PDF documents. These documents are managed and viewed on-line throughout the trial while all other court processes proceed as usual.
During the 2008-09 pilot period, legal firms are encouraged to use this process for civil cases where there is likely to be more than 500 relevant documents.
What are the benefits?
An eTrial streamlines and increases access to the justice system. It also helps legal firms to offer greater value to their clients by providing:
- fast access to fully text-searchable documents in court
- 24-hour real-time access for remote teams to relevant documents before and during a trial
- access during hearings to email and firm systems via Queensland Courts’ Wi-Fi service
- significant reductions in paper handling and photocopying
- compatibility with commercial document management and case preparation systems – enabling the bulk import of documents and related data
- an ability to scale the solution to trial requirements.
Queensland Courts welcomes all feedback on the eTrials pilot. Feedback should be sent to eTrials@courts.qld.gov.au.
How are the documents managed?
Queensland Courts have developed eCourtbook, a secure web portal for documents relevant to a court hearing. This user-friendly portal allows the judge, counsel and instructing solicitors to share, view and search documents 24 hours a day, prior to and during a trial.
Queensland Courts will establish an eCourtbook portal and provide all infrastructure at no cost to legal parties while it pilots these new processes. Legal firms simply need to list all document details on a spreadsheet and scan documents as fully text searchable, multi-page PDFs, then supply these to the court on a CD/DVD.
How is an eTrial conducted?
An eTrial is conducted like a paper-based hearing, except that documents are submitted and viewed electronically.
Queensland Courts will provide a desktop computer for each party in the courtroom and a large monitor to display documents for the public gallery.
Each computer can display the following views:
- court view – all screens in the courtroom simultaneously display the same document
- local view – parties can view documents and locate other documents independent of the court view
Last updated Thursday, 7 August 2008 7:21
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