In Miami, the integrated courtroom was used for international litigation, with witnesses in different time zones and language barriers.
The fully integrated electronic courtroom has arrived on American shores. Litigation services and software company Opus 2 International announced the completion of what it called the "first integrated 'pop-up' electronic courtroom built for paperless trials" in Miami, and confirmed the opening of a similar electronic courtroom in New York in early September.
Brenda Mahedy, head of global marketing at Opus 2 International, noted that while "various disparate hearing room services already exist in the U.S., such as trial presentation tools, third-party interpretation services, video conferencing," it is rare that all these services "are fully integrated with one another, yielding a much more seamless and efficient process" during trial.
While Opus 2, best known for its cloud-based collaborative work platform Magnum, could not disclose the details of the Miami trial for which the electronic courtroom was built, it noted the parties were two multinational companies with branches in the United States, U.K. and Europe engaged in international litigation. Both parties came to the trial with an extensive array of technology and witness services, including evidence and trial presentation technologies and French, Spanish and English interpretation services.
As the global economy "naturally leads to more cross-border matters and arbitrations that span multiple jurisdictions," Mahedy said, electronic courtrooms can prove pivotal by enabling "remote lawyers, arbitrators and witnesses to engage with the proceedings and contribute as though they were physically located in the room."
The increase of international litigation in U.S. court, she added, will help build momentum toward leveraging technology for use during trials.
Writing for Legaltech News, Clare Foley, vice president for litigation solutions for Opus 2, noted that while slow to take off, there are already instances of courts using of trial tech, such as state courts in Texas and Utah, which require the electronic filing of all civil cases.
On the federal level, U.S. district courts in the District of Columbia, the Western District of Michigan, the Central District of California and the Western District of Kentucky also provide evidence presentation capabilities, primarily though the addition of audio and video hardware in their courtrooms, Foley added.
Foley reasoned that the broader move toward electronic courtrooms in the United States is challenged by the country's decentralized courts systems, which can vary in their ability to implement legal technology and by their organizational structure and standard procedures.
The slow pace of courtroom digitization in the United States is in stark contrast to the rampant changes happening in the U.K., where electronic courtrooms first landed in the 2012 trial of Berezovsky v. Abramovich . The trial sparked a push by U.K. judicial authorities toward modernizing the country's courts and legal systems.
In 2013, for example, then-justice minister Damian Green announced £160 million in government funding toward launching paperless electronic courtrooms throughout the country by investing in Wi-Fi, court presentation and collaboration software, and audio and visual hardware, among other improvements. In 2014, the justice ministry announced an additional £75 million toward upgrading the technology at the U.K.'s HM Courts & Tribunals Service.
The adoption of trial technology in the U.K. can in part be attributed to the unique nature of its justice system, Mahedy said. "The model for litigation in the U.K. is based on a shared trial bundle that is aggregated and agreed before entering the hearing room," she explained. "This naturally leads to a more collaborative arrangement when deciding upon the technology, equipment and services to be used during the hearings. Additionally, places like the U.K. and Singapore have very mature initiatives in place for electronic litigation, whereas the U.S. court system is more fragmented in that respect."
