Today homeland technologies capable of making video processes easier and more accessible for all parties of the dispute are widely tested. Instead of going to the court a dispute participant should only visit the arbitration court website, log in using the gosuslugi.ru portal and participate in the litigation remotely. The innovation will be implemented in arbitration courts in a few weeks.
E-justice in figures
Since mid-March, the load on the e-justice system has grown by 22% in comparison with the last year. There is a significant increase in the attendance of the service and the number of submitted documents.
For example from March 22 to March 25 the number of primary documents for various categories of disputes has doubled. However by the beginning of April, the number of visitors to the system has gone down in one-third, but since April 5, the load on services has sharply raised. The first quarantine week apparently turned out to be shocking for everyone, including litigation participants. Now people are getting used to the changing conditions, although a week ago there was a slight confusion in the entire legal community.
Almost everyone was worried about the courts working schedule during the lockdown period as none of us had ever been in such circumstances. Even the heads of governments have difficulties in managing the current situation. Obviously the Russian judicial system does not have emergency scenarios for such cases.
We should pay justice to Vyacheslav Lebedev, the Chairman of the Supreme Court, from the beginning of this week things are going better. In addition to this, judges working in the arbitration system have an experience of a remote work and that is not a big deal for them. According to the technical support service the legal community is enthusiastic about technical innovations in the e-justice.
For example, many courts turn to the Supreme Court to get the online access to case materials. This means that the representatives of the parties, the professional legal community and the judges themselves are ready for digital justice today.
We were ready for remote justice
It is important that in the lockdown situation we did not even have to change the system. My Arbitrator, the heart of the electronic justice, was originally designed for the remote work.
For over 10 years, new features and services are being developed and the system has been constantly scaled. One thing that I have already mentioned turned out to be especially relevant today, this is an opportunity for the parties to go through the case files in the electronic form. This functionality is available since mid-February and its popularity and potential are obvious today.
You have access to the documents uploaded to My Arbitrator system, papers scanned by the court registry and audio recordings of court hearings. You can check out all the documents and there is no need to go to the court. Today more than 30 courts are already connected to the system and according to the schedule established by Supreme Court, by the end of May, the system will be implemented in all arbitrations.
Video courts are just around the corner
We faced the problems with the video-conferencing of the lawsuits, they are related to the legislation. According to the current norms of the Arbitration Procedure Code, Code of Civil Procedure and Administrative Offenses, the parties need to come to court to use this system, this means “court to court” connection. This allows you to verify the identity of participants, check documents, etc.
In the conditions of the lockdown it means the impossibility of holding a meeting in the videoconferencing mode. This approach should be changed and we have a technical solution. We have developed tools that will allow any lawyer and participant to join a meeting remotely, you just need to log in to the system on the court’s official website. Now a prototype of this solution is being tested, I think that the implementation will take several weeks. As a result participants can get the opportunity of official video conferencing with access via an enhanced electronic signature in the simplest and most convenient format. But as I said, the most important thing is the legislative framework.
The other day there was a message that one judge held a meeting via one of the popular instant messengers. The thing is that from the point of view of existing laws, if a complaint is received, the decision must be reversed on unconditional procedural grounds, because such a review procedure is currently missing in the law.
Therefore, we really hope for the initiative prepared by Alexei Russkikh, the deputy chairman of the Federation Council Committee on Economic Policy, and Andrei Klishas, the head of the committee on constitutional law and state building. For example, in terms of the Arbitration Procedure Code, it will be necessary to add the procedure in the Article #153.1. This will allow the official use of “out-of-court” video communications for holding meetings remotely. As I heard, these proposals were sent to the Supreme Court by senators. We and the entire legal community hope that Vyacheslav Lebedev will support them as he promotes all the innovations in Russian justice.
Like everywhere else in the world people like to criticize the judicial system. To be honest, in no other judicial system in the world there are more advanced automated systems than those used today in Russian justice. We know this for sure, because we made a detailed analysis of all existing analogues. Just look how the courts respond to the challenges and solve issues without unnecessary red tape.
We are ready for life “after the coronavirus”
Our country is ahead of the curve in the judicial system automation. I am talking not only about arbitration courts, but also about general jurisdiction courts. Therefore, it is worth telling the whole world how our e-justice works when the pandemic ends.
The current situation has already changed the world, we realized that we can effectively work from home, and technological innovations that we will introduce in the near future will remain with us forever. People will get used to it gradually. When electronic services were launched, My Arbitrator system had a very low number of claims and complaints, and now 35% of all claims and additional documents go to the courts precisely via these products.
Do not be afraid that after the end of the lockdown the courts will be flooded with a huge amount of documents. For example during the New Year and May holidays, you can only submit the documents and they are not processed, but the first day after the end of vacations, the judicial officers successfully process them. We are ready for such a load, it makes no difference to us: 1 million documents will be submitted or several million.
I don’t think that the epidemic will make justice more expensive. We see that now there has been a decline in business activity, I think that lawyers will have to lower prices. Even large law firms will become more flexible. The technology is another way to make justice more efficient and affordable for citizens and businesses.