By Alan Gahtan - December 9, 1996
A standing-room only crowd of hundreds of lawyers turned out at a recent information session at Osgoode Hall for Electronic Filing. The launch of this project follows months of planning and input from members of the judiciary, administration and the bar.
According to the project organizers, there are currently 11,000 lawyers in Toronto. Each year more than 45,000 civil cases are initiated, with an average of five filings per case. It is hoped that this new E-filing system will help streamline the 225,000 filings that currently come across the counter each year. Other benefits include reduced costs to the government and litigants and greater access to information while maintaining procedural fairness.
E-filing will be available for Civil, Family, Commercial and Bankruptcy cases but will not be available for Estates and Landlord & Tenant cases. All types of filings will be accepted electronically including claims, defences, petitions for divorce, etc. Eventually, the system will be expanded to handle motions.
The E-filing pilot is expected to start early next year and run for approximately six months. Software will be available in March, 1997 with Toronto participants going live on April 28, 1997.
Twenty firms were initially selected and a further eighty will now be added. To ensure a diverse variety of participants, the selection of firms will be random within small, medium and large firms and between firms predominantly representing plaintiffs and those representing defendants. The deadline for submitting applications is December 13th, 1996.
The participation of a firm typically means that everyone in the firm will be expected to participate. Also, a condition of participation is that each firm must send three or four of their staff for training.
Technically, the E-filing system utilizes standard software commonly used to create filings and e-mail. Templates that are completed in WordPerfect or Word and then attached to an e-mail message. The e-mail is transmitted to the court server which then checks the document and imports it into a central database. The sender of the document then receives an acknowledgement.
Implementation of the E-filing system will require a number of rule changes which are being worked on. The lack of signatures on documents has also necessitated a change in how proof of service of documents is handled. The E-filing system will use an E- Certificate of Service in which a lawyer certifies that they have a signed Affidavit of Service in their file.
The current system requires that a participant utilize at least Windows 3.1 or preferably Windows 95. Word 6.0 or WordPerfect 6.1 for Windows are also required. Macintosh users will be included after the initial 20 firms.
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