Gone are the days when all parties for a case needed their own pile of documents. The law uses more paper than nearly any other business or institution, retaining an almost Dickensian obsession with documentation.
Clerks and messengers stagger daily under the weight of paper packages and the requirement to put a bundle of agreed content before the courts means there are multiple sets of paperwork for counsel, solicitors, the judge and jury.
A worldwide solution has been found.
Opus 2 has invented a cloud-based technology which, it says, is simple to use, speeds up justice and answers the wasteful use of thousands of tonnes of paper and the deforestation it inevitably causes.
The system, called Magnum, was first implemented at the Berezovsky v Abramovich trial in London in 2013. Its introduction during the hearing at London's Rolls Building saved an estimated 5m sheets of A4 paper.
Without Magnum there would have been at least 30 sets of documents, each with over 200,000 pages, for the 120 lawyers involved – churned out by energy-sapping printers and regularly updated and transported, often by taxi, from offices to the court. The software won praise from the trial judge Mrs Justice Gloster who noted the efficiencies of the paperless trial in her written judgement.
Magnum works by storing court documents relevant to the litigation electronically. It then gives all parties – solicitors, barristers, claimants, defendants, judges and juries – secure access to the content via a laptop or iPad with litigation-specific functionality.
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Opus 2
