Remote Hearings

A partner at a City of London firm has been sanctioned for wrongly advising her clients that they could share a Zoom link for a remote court hearing. Ziva Robertson, partner at US-headquartered McDermott Will & Emery, received a written rebuke from the Solicitors Regulation Authority (SRA) on Mo

Nearly half of Scottish lawyers say representing clients in remote courtrooms is worse than in-person, according to a new survey. Accountancy firm Henderson Loggie surveyed dispute resolution and family lawyers across Scotland ahead of an expected post-pandemic increase in the volume of disputes wit

Most voters and businesses back the continued use of online court hearings as part of the modernisation of the justice system, a think-tank has claimed. The Social Market Foundation found that three-quarters of 1,000 individuals polled were content with online hearings and other remote access arrang

Holyrood's criminal justice committee has warned against setting in stone a presumption in favour of remote legal hearings. The committee has set out its views on the proposed extension of temporary changes to the justice system in the Scottish government’s Coronavirus (Recovery and Reform) Bi

A survey of Scottish solicitors has found that more than three-quarters think aspects of remote civil court work should continue after the pandemic. Findings from the Law Society of Scotland survey of 448 civil court practitioners have indicated that most think remote hearings work well for procedur

Jodi Gordon, partner at Road Traffic Accident Law (Scotland) LLP, comments on the development of remote hearings during the Covid-19 pandemic. ‘Working from home’ has become the norm for so many of us over the last 10 months. There have been challenges along the way requiring both employ

Plans to conduct High Court trials using remote jury centres are now underway and the first trials are expected to start at the end of September. Following the recommendation from Lady Dorrian's Restarting Solemn Trials Working Group, the first trials will be based in selected ODEON cinemas and are

A survey of members of the Faculty of Advocates has found that there is support for the use of remote hearings as a temporary measure during the COVID-19 pandemic. The survey found that four in five agree that remote hearings are a useful addition to how court hearings are heard in Scotland. However

Terra Firma's Jon Kiddie has considered the essentials of remote hearings in a new article, particularly in relation to civil proceedings, from where we were pre-pandemic to the current situation where remote hearings have become the new norm. "This article represents its author’s attempt to m

The vast majority of lawyers involved in remote court hearings during the COVID-19 pandemic in England and Wales are satisfied with their experience, a major survey has found. Having surveyed nearly 900 lawyers on the impact of COVID-19 on the civil justice system for the Civil Justice Council (CJC)

A drug trafficker has been sentenced to death in Singapore in a remote court hearing held using Zoom. Malaysian national Punithan Genasan, 37, was convicted on Friday of complicity in heroin trafficking in 2011.

Concerns have been raised over the fairness of remote hearings in family cases, introduced during the lockdown, because of the difficulty for participants in reading each other's reactions. A rapid consultation carried out by the Nuffield Family Justice Observatory (NFJO) on the effectiveness of rem