Next Steps in Online Courts: Accelerating Access toJustice Through Court Technology

For more than a decade, state courts have been expanding access to justice by adopting online dispute resolution (ODR) platforms and other outward-facing communication technologies. At a deep level, these reforms aim at improving society by bolstering the rule of law. At a surface level, these innovations recognize that the justice system works better when courts and law are easier and less costly to understand and use. In important respects, these efforts have been a success. The accessibility of many state courts is considerably more robust today than it was ten years ago, at least for small-stakes cases, like traffic disputes and small claims lawsuits. Yet the pace of innovation—at least in the eyes of some—has been sluggish and episodic. Courts to date have stuck to the comfortable shallows with their ideas, designing technology, for example, to facilitate private dispute resolution rather than incorporating technology into the adjudication process itself. In this article, I argue that state courts are beginning to swim beyond the breakers, and I offer Alaska as a case in point. Building on its years of experience using technology to mitigate unique geographic and demographic barriers and armed with the lessons on display in other states, Alaska is innovating. It is still early, and Alaska's approach to ODR has important limitations. Nevertheless, the state’s vision for its courts crosses new waters not only by soon making formal adjudication more accessible through asynchronous text-based proceedings but also by incorporating simple, thoughtful refinements to existing designs and by creating opportunities to leverage out-of-state resources.