Since the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, courts have allowed electronic filing as a means of preventing physical contact by expanding the use of technology.Toronto-based legal studies software provider CiteRight has noticed a wish and filled it with the launch of a loose electronic file toolkit.
The toolkit summarizes the electronic filing needs for Canada jurisdiction that allows it, follows a COVID-19 court appeal that the company filed in March and its main CiteRight product introduced last year, which is a platform that allows legal groups to paint in combination and cite fonts automatically.
“By creating a tool to help lawyers meet the needs of the court and generate presentations in a nice format, we’ve learned a lot about how courts work,” says Aaron Wenner, founder and CEO of CiteRight.”And … so we were able to object to the trend and say, “Okay, how can we generate more data on this that will help the legal community at large?The result is COVID’s online resource, a daily update on how judicial practice records are replaced in reaction to the coronavirus, and then the electronic filing toolbox.
“When we started talking to our customers, we heard that this system, electronic filing, was increasingly being implemented in Canada, but regulations were hard to find,” Wenner says.”We think we can make those regulations much more available to the general public by simply extracting the main parts, rather than having to read a full document at a glance.”
Wenner trained as a lawyer (McGill Law, then an intern at a giant Bay Street firm) and has had many disorders that CiteRight is looking to solve, he says.”With regard to coronavirus and electronic deposition, I knew there is a crisis. It’s like giving back to the legal community…However, from my experience, we care about making resources available.We have a general interest in contributing.”
“What we’ve done is take a look at both one and both places in Canada that allow electronic deposition and extract unusual elements from it.Is there a deposit fee?A naming agreement [for files]?… For jurisdiction, we have completed this list …We have summarized these regulations for one and both jurisdictions in Canada that allow electronic filing, and if there is more than one branch in that court.provides a summary at a glance for electronic filing of court documents.»
CiteRight clients come with some of Canada’s largest law firms, and Wenner says the reaction to its main product and toolkit has been very rewarding; “The traffic in ours has doubled and we continue to grow.
All CiteRights have been developed in close collaboration with their users, and new information, such as filing fees, has recently been added.
“Given the crisis in the legal profession, we seek to make sure that we can do our part, so that lawyers can simply work on the pictures they want and return to the pictures more quickly.