The progress of IT in the courtroom during the last five years has been dramatic, with ‘quill pen technology’ being replaced by 21st century IT and communication systems and facilities.
As legislation governing the use of technology has been relaxed, the introduction of these facilities into the courtroom has been accelerated. Many of the legal world’s more complex trials now resemble a modern hi-tech office, full of monitors, computers and all the associated gadgetry.
These days, most court applications require a combination of different image sources and many include video and video-conferencing inputs, as well as digitised evidence. All of this is now being co-ordinated to include rolling on-screen display of the real-time transcription of verbatim proceedings, superseding the old-fashioned stenographed report.
Some of the facilities typically used in courtrooms today are detailed below.
Pre-trial preparation and scanning
At the early stages of any case involving the pulling together of a mass of potential evidence, the technology to be used is a major consideration. With the use of CD-roms, hundreds of documents can be scanned onto disk, duly scheduled and logged for ease of identification/retrieval at a later stage, and then stored until needed. Subsequent legal reviews enable the trial bundles to be produced and then transferred onto a series of disks for use at the hearing.
