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2.6. Other applications of information technology relevant to courts


In the remainder of this Chapter, we mention other applications of information
technology relevant to courts which may be involved in criminal trials,
including word processing, computerised access to law, access to sentencing
information, electronic mail, case management systems, court records
management, electronic mail, and judicial electronic document interchange.
None of these are of particular relevance to complex (rather than non-complex)
trials. Many are of equal relevance to civil proceedings. The reason for
reviewing them here is because the same equipment and infrastructure which is
provided to judges or installed in courts may also need to be used
to provide access to any of these sources of
information, and may therefore need to be                               [PP24]
sufficiently multi-purpose to accommodate these uses.
Furthermore, the costs of equipment and infrastructure can be
justified in part by these additional uses.


Access to sources of law - cases, statutes, and other sources


Computerised access to sources of law is valuable to any court. In the United
States, most Federal judges have on-line access from chambers to the LEXIS and
Westlaw systems containing virtually all US case and statute law (and much
else). In the United Kingdom, this is still not so (Neill (1992)). In
Australia, the question of what is the most effective way to obtain
computerised access to sources of law is complex, principally because of the
fragmented way in which computerisation of legal sources in Australia have developed, but
also because of normal competitive factors (see Greenleaf, Mowbray and Lewis
(1988) Chapter 4 for the early history of developments; see also Lindgren
(1990) and Greenleaf (1990)). Very few if any judges yet have electronic
access from chambers to all the sources of law they may need , though many
have access to some. We assume that capacity for effective access to
computerised sources of law is a fundamental requirement of any equipment
provided to the judiciary for use in chambers, and would be valuable for any
equipment provided to any of the parties for use in court.


CD-ROM networking


An increasing array of Australian primary legal materials are available on CD-
ROM. Info-One International, through its Lawpac trade name, publishes the
reported and unreported judgments of the Supreme Courts of New South Wales,
Victoria, South Australia, Western Australia (unreported judgments only) and
Tasmania. DiskROM Australia publishes High Court, Federal Court, Family Court
and AAT reported and unreported judgments, and Commonwealth statutes, as well
as some specialised services including secondary materials. Unreported
judgements on CD-ROM will, of course, always be somewhat out of date, though
it is now practical for this gap to be reduced to a month or so. The AUSTROM
CD-ROM includes Australian bibliographic material (including the Commonwealth
Attorney-General's Department's AGIS database and the Australian Institute of
Criminology's CINCH database). The Legal Trac (Current Law Index) and
WilsonDisk (Index to Legal Periodicals) CD ROMs contain international
bibliographic databases. Other secondary source materials (textbooks etc) will
become available with increasing frequency.

Networking of CD-ROMs through local area network (LAN) technology now allows
simultaneous access to these databases to multiple users. Such networking can
be included in the network operating system through modules for general LAN
software (such as SCSII Express for Novell), or through specialised CD-ROM
networking software such as CD-Net, CBIS CD Server or Optinet. All of the CD-
ROMs mentioned above can be so networked without difficulty. CD-ROM networking
is an increasingly cost-effective means of providing high quality access to
legal source materials, particularly when the significant hourly costs of
accessing on-line systems are considered. The search software available for CD-
ROMs is generally more 'user friendly', and with more advanced search features
(eg hypertext) than that available on dial-up systems, due to local execution
and use of microcomputer GUIs.



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