Roger Smith talks at the openJustice launch party this week on the future of access to justice in the UK
openJustice is a welcome addition to the groups lobbying for access to justice. And it has one great advantage over many of the others: it can creditably present itself as independent of the practitioners and professionals who are themselves funded by legal aid. We need a new player in the debate with lineage in discussions of democracy, constitutions and human rights. We need this for credibility at a dangerous time and we need it for support of a wide coalition for access to justice that goes beyond the usual suspects. You can see the need very clearly in reviewing the current state of development in relation to technology and such access.
January is the month for predictions. Journalists and commentators swarm into print and on the web to knock off a piece about what is coming up in the new year. For the subject of technology in the context of access to justice, this is actually remarkably hard to do. For a start, it is difficult to get the time scale right. Even in the big corporate firms, there may be deceptively little change visible in the next year, though under the surface movements of a tectonic nature are in progress.
