Modernising the courts

C‑Track, a sys­tem designed by Thom­son Reuters, has for more than ten years been a huge suc­cess at help­ing tack­le chal­lenges in a range of courts across the Unit­ed States. C‑Track is a user-friend­ly case man­age­ment solu­tion that has been specif­i­cal­ly designed to cap­ture, track, process and report on court infor­ma­tion, allow­ing more effi­cient han­dling and pro­cess­ing of data.

Jim Lea­son, court man­age­ment solu­tions pro­gramme man­ag­er at Thom­son Reuters, explains that C‑Track is divid­ed into three mod­ules. The first deals with back-office case man­age­ment issues, such as sched­ul­ing, list­ings and oth­er gen­er­al doc­u­ment man­age­ment, while the oth­er two pro­vide e‑filing and pub­lic access capa­bil­i­ties.

These front-end mod­ules allow for the deposit­ing of doc­u­ments into the court sys­tem, with C‑Track capa­ble of man­ag­ing the pas­sage of cas­es through all courts and tiers in the sys­tem, not just those devot­ed to com­mer­cial hear­ings or those for hear­ing tri­als. They also pro­vide live pub­lic access to case list­ings and oth­er non-con­fi­den­tial case infor­ma­tion facil­i­tat­ing a more trans­par­ent process.

“Many exist­ing court tech­nol­o­gy sys­tems have been around for 15-plus years and need updat­ing,” says Mr Lea­son. “There have been sev­er­al pro­grammes announced in recent years to deliv­er ‘dig­i­tal by default’ jus­tice, a cur­rent aim of the Min­istry of Jus­tice and the Scot­tish gov­ern­ment. As the Uni­fied Patent Court, a Euro­pean ini­tia­tive, comes into exis­tence, it will be imple­ment­ing court tech­nolo­gies from the start. Our C‑Track prod­uct suite can deliv­er an effi­cient and uni­fied sys­tem for the courts.”

Minnesota’s state supreme court imple­ment­ed the sys­tem near­ly a dozen years ago and in 2008 Chief Jus­tice Eric Mag­nu­son said, in his state of the judi­cia­ry address, that C‑Track had made a big impact.

Most exist­ing court man­age­ment tech­nol­o­gy in the UK has been in place for around 15-plus years and needs updat­ing

“Minnesota’s infor­ma­tion sys­tems have leapfrogged more than a cen­tu­ry,” he said, “from a time where phys­i­cal pieces of paper were hand-deliv­ered from place to place, to a time when case records are updat­ed in court in real time; case his­to­ries are avail­able online in a sec­ond or two; and one can tog­gle back and forth between mul­ti­ple doc­u­ments from a lap­top on the bench or in cham­bers.”

At the Mon­tana state supreme court, where the sys­tem was imple­ment­ed in 2002, records show that dur­ing its first 12 months, C‑Track was respon­si­ble for an 11 per cent reduc­tion in cas­es car­ried for­ward to the next year.

Announc­ing the mod­erni­sa­tion pro­gramme in Lon­don last year, Jus­tice Min­is­ter Mike Pen­ning warmed the hearts of tech-savvy lit­i­ga­tion lawyers by stat­ing the gov­ern­ment was “com­mit­ted to end­ing the courts’ out­dat­ed reliance on paper”.

Andrew Pena, a com­mer­cial lit­i­ga­tor and man­ag­ing part­ner at Lon­don solic­i­tors’ firm Cubism Law, is among spe­cial­ists who will be look­ing for­ward to improve­ment. “Our court sys­tem prides itself on being one of the most robust, fairest and attrac­tive to inter­na­tion­al lit­i­gants, so we need to think through how as much of the process can be done online and vir­tu­al­ly, with less paper­work,” he says.

That’s all well and good for those lawyers and judges at home with tech­nol­o­gy, but are there oth­ers in the legal pro­fes­sion stand­ing in the way of mod­erni­sa­tion?

“There’s an ele­ment of that,” Mr Pena con­cedes. “But in the past there have been issues around the qual­i­ty of the tech­nol­o­gy and ease of access. The key is sim­plic­i­ty – the ease of use of the sys­tem. If it is easy to use, then peo­ple will embrace it.”

C‑TRACK

HIGHLY CONFIGURABLE

C‑Track can be con­fig­ured to meet your court’s needs, and is eas­i­ly adapt­able to unique rules and process­es. C‑Track also includes a tool that allows rule changes to be made quick­ly and eas­i­ly with­out tech­ni­cal sup­port.

EASY TO INSTALL AND MAINTAIN

The sys­tem resides on a serv­er, giv­ing you access right from your web brows­er, mean­ing there’s no soft­ware to install.

SCALABLE SOLUTION

C‑Track is a tai­lored, adapt­able and scal­able solu­tion, which cur­rent­ly sup­ports three mil­lion cas­es, 20.6 mil­lion fil­ings and 14,500 users.

MODULARISED

Use all of C‑Track or only the mod­ules that align with your strate­gic needs.

INTEGRATED

C‑Track can be inte­grat­ed with almost any court appli­ca­tion from an exist­ing case man­age­ment sys­tem, to a solicitor’s reg­is­tra­tion sys­tem, to an account­ing or doc­u­ment man­age­ment sys­tem.

COMPREHENSIVE

C‑Track pro­vides com­pre­hen­sive case pro­cess­ing func­tions from case ini­ti­a­tion through dis­po­si­tion and archiv­ing. It also allows for exten­sive search­ing and real-time inter­ac­tive report­ing.

INTUITIVE

Pri­or to instal­la­tion, the entire sys­tem can be reviewed and tai­lored to meet the spe­cif­ic needs of your court. The sys­tem allows intu­itive doc­u­ment gen­er­a­tion, event record­ing in real time and cus­tom alert­ing.

RELIABLE

C‑Track has a proven per­for­mance record over more than ten years in a vari­ety of courts and sig­nif­i­cant­ly reduces risk com­pared with a ground-up built sys­tem.

C‑TRACK SUITE OF PRODUCTS

C‑TRACK CASE MANAGEMENT SYSTEM (CMS)

C‑Track Case Man­age­ment Sys­tem man­ages infor­ma­tion about cas­es, fil­ings, par­ties, cal­en­dars and opin­ion pro­cess­ing, allow­ing courts to track their per­for­mance and max­imise effi­cien­cy. Pow­er­ful list­ing func­tion­al­i­ty adapts to both appel­late courts and high-vol­ume tri­al court envi­ron­ments.

C‑TRACK E‑FILING

C‑Track E‑Filing allows par­ties to elec­tron­i­cal­ly file doc­u­ments, enabling greater effi­cien­cy and reduced costs in case prepa­ra­tion. It is offered as a stand­alone solu­tion and can be eas­i­ly inte­grat­ed into the court’s envi­ron­ment or installed as a host­ed solu­tion.

C‑TRACK PUBLIC ACCESS

C‑Track Pub­lic Access is a high­ly con­fig­urable appli­ca­tion that allows the gen­er­al pub­lic to search for non-con­fi­den­tial cas­es using sim­ple search cri­te­ria such as case num­ber, solic­i­tor or par­ty.

OTHER MODULES

Oth­er C‑Track prod­ucts include a crim­i­nal case mod­ule and addi­tion­al mod­ules con­tin­ue to be devel­oped.

MODERNISATION IN LAND OF LAKES

At 5.4 mil­lion souls, Min­neso­ta is about two thirds the size of Lon­don and the 21^st most pop­u­lat­ed US state.

That posi­tion of being rel­a­tive­ly in the mid­dle of America’s pop­u­la­tion league table makes it an ide­al yard­stick for mea­sur­ing the effec­tive­ness of court mod­erni­sa­tion. Twelve years ago, the state jumped to the fore­front of court case man­age­ment tech­nol­o­gy.

The author­i­ties imple­ment­ed an ear­ly ver­sion of Thom­son Reuters’ C‑Track sys­tem, which state Supreme Court Chief Jus­tice Eric Mag­nu­son described as cre­at­ing a leapfrog advance of “more than a cen­tu­ry”.

The process kicked off with func­tion­al­i­ty in the clerk’s offices at the state’s appeal court. Sched­ul­ing and opin­ion pro­cess­ing for that court and the supreme court were tar­get­ed, as was report­ing func­tion­al­i­ty with sta­tis­ti­cal and detailed case data, and com­pre­hen­sive search capa­bil­i­ty based on con­fig­urable data entry options.

Tools were added over the years, includ­ing a pub­lic ver­sion that pro­vides elec­tron­ic access to appro­pri­ate case infor­ma­tion for users out­side the court, case list­ing noti­fi­ca­tions, and e‑notification, which pro­vides elec­tron­ic copies of court-gen­er­at­ed doc­u­ments to coun­sel, low­er courts and oth­ers.

Minnesota’s expe­ri­ence has illus­trat­ed how a mod­ern case man­age­ment sys­tem can allow courts to process cas­es online. It is also seen as bring­ing quan­ti­ta­tive and qual­i­ta­tive val­ue by imple­ment­ing more effec­tive and effi­cient process­es, bet­ter access to accu­rate case infor­ma­tion for the bench, advo­cates, the media and the pub­lic.

In addi­tion, there are the ben­e­fits of enhanced pro­duc­tiv­i­ty and job sat­is­fac­tion for court staff through using a sys­tem that is eas­i­er to learn and oper­ate.

Accord­ing to for­mer Min­neso­ta Supreme Court Com­mis­sion­er Richard Slowes: “A well-designed case man­age­ment sys­tem will deliv­er… more effi­cient data entry, more effec­tive data retrieval, bet­ter tools, and enhanced bar and pub­lic access.”

C-TRACK

HIGHLY CONFIGURABLE

EASY TO INSTALL AND MAINTAIN

SCALABLE SOLUTION