Victoria Courthouse Runs Second E-Trial

The Victoria courthouse will hear its second E-Trial beginning April 15. Justice Dev Dley ordered the case run as an e-trial using the UK program, Caselines. The parties to Hutchison v. Moore; BCSC Victoria Actions S-123664 and 151985 will be the first in Canada to use this e-trial platform.

BC Supreme Court judges have been aware of Caselines for a while. In a Civil Litigation section meeting in February 2019, Justice Myers, hosted by Michelle Maniago, discussed practical tips and best practices for the electronic presentation of evidence at trial. Justice Myers talked about using Opus II in Pro-Sys Consultation Ltd. v. Microsoft, which settled in the fall of 2018. That experience led him to Caselines. He said any party interested in running an E-Trial using the program should get in touch. Bill MacLeod, Q.C., of MacLeod and Company did that, and now Victoria has a second E-Trial.

The case is not a simple one. It considers the administration of a trust, first settled in 1962. The Notice of Civil Claim was filed in 2012. Many thousand discovery documents have been exchanged.

Caselines is a cloud-based program. When the Hutchison parties arrive in court, their documents will already have been loaded into the program, and they will already have noted them up in preparation for the litigation. All parties and the judge will follow the presentation being made by whichever counsel is making their case from that counsel’s laptop.

The E-Trial is scheduled for 30 days in Courtroom 404, the same room that housed Victoria’s first E-Trial between October 2014-November 2017.

Why it matters: The Victoria Courthouse is becoming a veritable hotbed of innovation. This will be the first time Caselines has been used in Canada. Justice Dev Dley ordering the E-Trial is more evidence that judges are keen to see improvements in courtroom processes, and that makes this another E-trial Resource for anyone looking to run their own E-trial.