I've put together a research project that looks to a future where New Zealand is likely to follow the online court trend, a trend that is already taking off in British Columbia and England and Wales. The study is co-funded by the University of Otago Legal Issues Centre and a generous grant from the New Zealand Law Foundation's Information Law and Policy Project.
Sadly, detailed illustrations [of how online dispute resolution will work in practice] are hard to come by. The scholarly literature is devoid of transcripts and richly detailed ethnographies and full of self-serving generalities and self-sealing conclusions.
Unless people are effectively able to explain their dispute in an online portal, the online court model won't deliver the oft-touted promise of access to justice. This project therefore looks at how effective are lay people at translating a justiciable dispute into a legally coherent claim, with their performance compared to lawyers. It will then go on to explore innovations that might assist lay people to explain their dispute to the court.
I'm not attempting to do this alone. I've assembled a crack team of researchers to tackle different aspects. My Otago colleague Dr Bridget Irvine, who comes from a law and psychology background, will be running the lab-based experiments testing how people translate a justiciable event into a legal claim. Dr Tatiana Tkacukova, a Senior Lecturer in Linguistics at Birmingham City University (who specialises in lay litigant communication), will be analysing previously filed court documents and the lab generated material from a linguistic perspective. Associate Professor Sally Jo Cunningham and Dr David Nichols, who specialise in Human Computer Interaction at Waikato University, will be taking these results and developing and testing new approaches to assist people in communicating their disputes effectively in an online portal.
The project kicks off in January 2018 and we are keen to hear from anyone who is doing complementary work in this field. Drop me a line at bridgette.toy-cronin@otago.ac.nz.
I agree that it can be a significant challenge for lay people to acess a legal system whether on line or otherwise. I believe that to consider how lay people might engage with on-line courts, it is necessary to look at the system from the perspective of a lay person rather than the lens of the legal profession or system. Anaylsis might need to include cultural factors whihc inform the world view of the potential applicant. I wonder whether it is better to have a real person available to assist at the intial stage rather than leaving it up to a person to try and manage form filling without understanding what is a legal problem that can ultimately be dealt with by an on-line or actual court.