The British Columbia Experience – Past, Present and Future

by Steven Tam

Over the last two years, we have seen the introduction and implementation of a number of electronic filing (“e-filing”) initiatives across the province. In the spring of 2004, both the Corporate Registry and the Land Title Registry launched systems that allowed for the submission of electronic information and/or documents to those institutions over the Internet. Last fall, the B.C. courts launched e-filing pilot projects in Kelowna and Vernon with a plan to enable province-wide e-filing for Civil Supreme and Provincial Court matters by the spring of this year.

What does this mean for lawyers and the practice of law in the coming years?

E-filing will bring both opportunities and challenges for law firms. Those firms that embrace electronic filing and set up their business processes to take advantage of this new way of delivering legal information and documents will gain efficiencies and derive cost savings that will improve their bottom line. It will also position them to operate more profitably in an increasingly competitive legal services market.

While e-filing creates the potential for law firms to gain significant efficiencies, realizing actual efficiencies will take effort and a commitment to change on the part of lawyers. Learning the actual process of electronic filing in most instances is easy. Changing the internal processes of law firms to facilitate electronic filing and the utilization and management of electronic information and documents will be the biggest challenge. This has been one of the reasons why the percentage of land titles filings being done electronically still remains relatively low even though the system has been available for almost two years.

An effective way for law firms to transition to e-filing is by ensuring that lawyers and staff achieve a base-level understanding of and comfort with handling and managing documents in electronic formats, such as MS Word and PDF. When lawyers and legal staff are comfortable and proficient with electronic file management inside the law firm, e-filing becomes a simple and even appealing new way of doing business. This means that proper training and education on fundamental computer skills, such as electronic file creation, usage, storage, and protection, should be the focus of any internal effort to implement electronic filing. Firms that make a commitment to putting in the effort to adjust their processes for electronic filing will be well positioned to achieve substantial efficiency gains and deliver a higher level of service and value to their clients.

Law firms should also beware of technology tools that can help facilitate the e-filing process. RemoteLaw’s econveyance™ and the B.C. Notaries’ Pro-Suite are examples of computer applications that help legal professionals prepare land title documents for electronic filing.

As the B.C. courts roll out their e-filing system, we will no doubt see new technology products and services that help law firms ease into electronic filing of court documents. Some examples that we may see are electronic “links” between the B.C. courts’ e-filing system and popular law practice management systems (e.g. Amicus Attorney, Time Matters) and/or litigation support systems (e.g. Summation, Searchlight) which facilitate direct e-filing from within those law office applications, thereby, minimizing duplicate data entry.

Steven Tam, a lawyer and Legal Technology Consultant, formerly with CrimsonLogic, a global application service provider of IT solutions for courts and law firms.

This article was published in the April 2006 issue of BarTalk. © 2006 The Canadian Bar Association. All rights reserved.