Hi and welcome to the Orange Rag, covering all the latest legal tech news, wins, deals, and acquisitions that happened October.
October was a very busy and at times difficult month for law courts on both sides of the Atlantic, and our top story is an exclusive that leading Florida defence firm Cole Scott & Kissane has selected and very quickly rolled out automated court filing solution ECFX, driven by changes to the E-service Notification of Electronic Filing (NEF) in Florida, which came into force on 29 October. PDFs of documents will no longer be sent out by the Court and have been replaced by an emailed link that will expire after seven days. I spoke to Jason Thomas, chief information officer at CSK, and Dan O’Day, founder and CEO of ECFX about what those changes mean and how ECFX is helping.
In the UK, we have seen strikes across 68 Courts in protest at a new case management system called Common Platform. If you thought your tech roll out was going pear shaped, you arguably ain’t seen nothing, as people across the legal tech industry question how this circa £300m project has cost so much and is so unpopular with court staff. Take a look at that story and some of the reaction to it on LinkedIn.
The UK Courts in October also saw the first televised sentencing of a woman and only the second televised sentencing ever, following a change in the law two years ago to allow cameras in courtrooms. It is hoped that cameras will bring greater transparency to sentencing and I’ve included a clip of Judge Richard Marks KC remarks with that story.
Elsewhere, it is also interesting to note that the momentum behind UK class actions is building, and in our Wins and Deals section you can find details of a partnership under which Shieldpay will integrate its digital mass disbursements payment service into Case Pilots’ group action administration platform – described by one leading class action partner as a ‘marriage made in heaven.’
Happy reading, for all the latest news as it breaks make sure you subscribe to our daily updates here.
Caroline Hill