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The ITAC Committee and Report


The Information Technology and the Courts (ITAC) Committee was formed in 1988
as a pressure group drawn from seven constituent bodies - the Bar Council, the
Law Society, the Society for Computers and the Law, the Crown Prosecution
Service, the Lord Chancellor's Department, the Metropolitan Police and the
Serious Fraud Office (Purnell (1990)). ITAC has been chaired since its
inception by Sir Brian Neill LJ , then also President of the Society for
Computers and the Law. ITAC recommended that a single policy body be
established to direct and coordinate the introduction of court technology, and
the Home Office then invited it to take this role and produce another report,
with terms of reference 'To investigate the scope for, and assess the
feasibility of, the introduction of technology into the courtroom to assist in
the presentation of evidence in Serious Fraud Cases' (Purnell (1990)).

The ITAC Report (1989), prepared by a committee chaired by Rant J, contains
numerous recommendations which will be referred to throughout this Report. In
summary, it recommended a 'basic minimum pool of equipment' which should be
available for use in any complex fraud trial, and should be compatible with
standardised prosecution equipment (13.1). Courts should hire the equipment
when needed, rather than buy it (13.2). Custom-built courts for fraud trials
should be established in Crown court centres (9.1). The defence should be able
to hire compatible equipment, costs to be met from the legal aid fund (7.7) (a
conclusion which falling equipment costs may have rendered obsolete). The
development of protocols for compatibility of equipment was 'the most
important single factor' in their considerations (14.1). The other crucial
factor was 'for coherent decisions to be made as to who is to pay' (14.2).

Purnell (1990) had concluded, rather pessimistically, that the ITAC Report
'lies gathering dust in one or more government departments', noting that
'(e)ach of the agencies within the criminal justice system simply sits back
and waits for this buck [the funding question] to be passed around from one to
the other and nothing is achieved'. However, Waugh (1991) reports that
standards for building, equipping and furnishing of courtrooms have been
developed by the Home Office following the ITAC Report, and a 'core system'
based on IBM compatible PCs has been specified. Eleven Crown Court Centres
have been nominated for adaptation to handle trials involving the use of
computer technology, and are expected to handle up to 45 cases involving
complex evidence by 1993. It has been decided that 'the Lord Chancellor's
Department will pay for adaptation of courtrooms and wiring requirements
whilst the prosecuting authority will pay for the equipment'. According to
Hill (1991), the Lord Chancellor's Department's 'prototype of the new multi-
purpose court room, supposedly designed with the use of information technology
in mind', 'drew the wrath and disbelief of the practising profession and ...
has resulted in a rethink'.

Since 1988 ITAC's membership has grown to twelve, by inclusion of the Home
Office (apparently replacing the Lord Chancellor's Department), the Central
Computer and Telecommunications Agency (CCTA), the Council of Circuit Judges,
the Association of District Judges, the Legal Aid Board, and the Justices
Clerks Society Information Technology Policy Committee. ITAC meets three times
per year, with each of its constituent bodies submitting a report on its
activities in that period (Neill (1992)). ITAC has also participated in annual
conferences on litigation support. Neill LJ has characterised
ITAC's progress as 'snail-like' (Neill (1992)), and is still
calling for the establishment of an effective coordinating
committee (Shaw (1992)), so it seems that neither ITAC nor any          [PP42]
other body has attained a permanent co-ordinating role in the UK.


Other co-ordinating bodies


The Home Office coordinates the Steering Committee for the Coordination of
Computerisation in the Criminal Justice System (CCCJS), the purpose of which
is essentially the exchange of information between agencies in the criminal
justice system, to track cases and individuals. In 1991 a Judicial Standing
Committee for IT (JSCIT) was established to examine how judges could benefit
from the use of information technology. It is involved in a pilot study
(JUDITH) as to how twenty five selected judges might benefit from the use of
word processing (Neill (1992)).

Neill LJ concluded in 1992 that the United Kingdom is 'not in the vanguard of
those seeking to apply information technology to the work of the courts and
the needs of the judiciary' (Neill (1992)).


The Serious Fraud Office and its trials


The Serious Fraud Office's use of information technology is obviously
important because of its pivotal role in the investigation and prosecution of
complex crime in the United Kingdom. The SFO uses information technology in
all six stages of investigation and pre-trial preparation for prosecution
(Mills (1991)). When the SFO takes over a matter, all documents and statements
are catalogued with unique numbers and keywords under a document control
system developed jointly with the City and the Metropolitan Police. Documents
are then converted into computer text by optical character recognition, and a
concordance is created for free text retrieval. Not all documents are scanned,
only those considered sufficiently relevant to a case: FinTech (1991).
Computer disks which are seized are copied onto optical disks to preserve
their integrity, and also used to create a concordance for free text
retrieval. Event indexes are developed progressively as the documents are
used. Documents are marked with statement and exhibit numbers, so that it is
easy to produce 'a comprehensive and accurate list of the unused material to
disclose to the defence', which used to be 'a time consuming and difficult
task'. Graphics are prepared for court presentation where appropriate. In
court, the SFO uses 'a central court control display unit which provides the
images to the visual display units in front to the judge, the jury, counsel,
the witness and the defendants and all other interested parties'. The VDUs can
be used to display static or moving graphics, documents through capture by
camera, and video evidence. Transcript of the proceedings is added daily to a
database containing transcripts of witness statements (Mills (1991)).
Documents are only stored and used as text, not as document images. The
retrieval software used is The Corporate Retriever (FinTech (1991)). The
SFO's use of presentation technologies is detailed in Chapter 7.

Despite this significant use of information technology, the SFO has had well-
known problems with some complex fraud prosecutions, including the later Guinness
trials and the Blue Arrow trial. In the wake of Blue Arrow, the Lord
Chancellor's Department is conducting an investigation into complex fraud
trials which is still underway at the time of writing. The Bar Council has
presented to this investigation its own Roberts Report on Long Fraud Trials,
but, as reported, it does not seem to say anything about use of information
technology, except for the need for juries to be given assistance in absorbing
and organising complex arguments by such things as summaries of statements
and evidence (see Roberts (1993), Tran (1993)).


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