Legal Tech for Justice Enhancing Access to Justice in Family Violence Legal Services

In the last few decades, developments in technology have significantly changed the ways people communicate and engage in business processes. The legal profession, as with other professions, has increasingly recognised the importance of using technologies to maximise efficiency and productivity and to improve communication (Wang, 2019). A report by the Law Society of New South Wales (LSNSW, 2017) on the future of law and innovation notes that legal practices are increasingly interested in and engaging with legal technology. Similarly, a report undertaken by the Networked Society Institute of the University of Melbourne states: Technology is now core to the practice of law for most lawyers with widespread use of email, online legal research and electronic court filing. Process-oriented technologies are gradually increasing with online legal information, simple document assembly, e-discovery, workflow and project management (Bennett et al., 2018, p. 21).The COVID-19 global public health crisis and the restrictions and lockdowns that came with it placed further pressure on the legal sector to embrace technological change, with many court systems and legal service providers needing to pivot to remote access technology (Sourdin & Zeleznikow, 2020). Measures were implemented towards paperless digital courtrooms that allow judges, lawyers, and litigants ‘to work more effectively in a secure online and virtual environment’ (LexisNexis, 2021). For example, the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom conducted its first ever remote hearing in March 2020 (Mahleka, 2021). The Federal Court of Australia issued a series of Special Measures Information Note (SMIN), setting out arrangements for the operation of the Court during the COVID-19 outbreak.5 The SMINs include measures aimed at ensuring the health and safety of the community, including minimising in person attendance on Court premises, physical distancing, and allowing the Chief Justice to determine whether appeals or Full Court hearings will be conducted in person, electronically, or by a combination of the two.

However, while there is a rich body of literature exploring the impact of technological changes on the legal profession and on the justice system in general (Sourdin, 2015; Gowder, 2018; Bell, 2019; Surden, 2019; Wang, 2019; Sourdin & Zeleznikow, 2020) there is considerably less attention paid on the impact of technology on access to justice for disadvantaged groups, particularly for victims/survivors of DFV.