THE FUTURE AS WE
SEE IT
Imagine the rise of “Alternate Dispute Resolution Systems” (ADRS) which puts the responsibility of dispute resolution into the hands of able individuals and teams, which can reduce the pressure on the courts to clear the ever increasing backlog of cases. With the power of technology, we can create systems where people seeking dispute resolution can easily find and connect with ADRs online, collaborate with them to move cases to closure. Lawmatters.com is one such online marketplace Codewave designed and developed to bring together consumers and legal professionals / interns / counselling experts on an online platform. People who need help, can find and collaborate with experts to handle their case, off the court. Such online platforms have the potential to bring people together, generate crowd-sourced solutions (through legal forums) and create compelling job opportunities for freelancing professionals who are experts in negotiations and dispute settlements.
Apart from relieving the courts of their big pile of cases, “smart applications” can simplify and accelerate existing manual processes and procedures of the court, that involve drafting, vetting and signing of paper documents at various stages of a case, by multiple parties. With better internet infrastructure in the courts, in situations where physical presence of an individual is not feasible, video conferencing can be enabled. Advanced scrutiny applications can auto detect fraud / crime in the electronic evidences submitted to the court (CD / Files / Video etc). With digitization of the case records, case history and judgements – Governments can better analyse the nature of crimes, root cause and get insights to nurture citizens towards creating healthier, progressive societies. Today with a lot of work happening on paper files, Government lacks quick visibility of current crime levels, number of cases (changing with time) and nature of these cases (civil, criminal, family, cyber, traffic, corporate etc). With the right advancements happening in this industry, we can create a society that makes prisons an irrelevance.