News

Royal Courts of Justice take part in E-collaborate pilot

Merrill Legal Solutions has been developing the E-collaborate system for a number of years. This virtual document and library system is accessed from the internet and allows documents to be loaded, organised and edited within a secure environment and allows users to see versions of an edited document much sooner than they would if they had to wait for a hard copy to be delivered to them. The system also alerts specified users when a new upload takes place or a document changes, thereby keeping users updated on the progress of a draft judgment, for example.

For the past few months, six Lord Justices of Appeal have been involved in a pilot scheme in the use of the system to amend and approve their judgments. At the outset of the pilot, the Merrill team trained the judges (or their clerks) in the use of the E-collaborate system and once they were ready, they started to receive e-mail alerts to advise them that new draft judgments for approval had been posted to E-collaborate for amendment. The judge would then make whatever amendments were required and return the judgment to Merrill using the same system with an e-mail alert to Merrill’s Royal Courts of Justice administration team that the amended judgment had been posted on E-collaborate.

In an exciting development, as from the beginning of October, the Lord Justices have opted to extend the pilot to include all of the Lord Justices of Appeal thereby increasing the numbers taking part from six to over 40. Training has been taking place for judges and clerks over the past few weeks and Merrill’s RCJ team is looking forward to working on the extended pilot.

Caroline Woodman, Merrill Legal Solutions’ Contracts Business Director says: “We are always looking at ways to improve our services and we hope that the E-collaborate system will reduce the time spent making amendments to transcripts thereby improving the overall delivery of Court of Appeal transcripts.”

For further information on the E-collaborate system, please contact Diane Fleuty at diane.fleuty@merrillcorp.com