Tribunal halts all Information Commissioner's Office cases because UK data watchdog can't print or organise PDFs A UK tribunal halted 60 cases against the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) because the data watchdog's staff can't print documents or electronically organise them into hearing bundles, The Register has learned. Not only did the First-Tier Tribunal's General Regulatory Chamber (GRC) grant a 28-day stay of all cases …
Yes, that was my thought. Not so much that they can't generate the PDFs, more that they will probably need to have an agreed upon electronic indexing and cross-referencing system (which will need to be implemented and tested) and you need some form of secure transmission (which will need to be implemented and tested), before you can actually start sending out live electronic bundles.
Not really a problem.
As they're interfacing with Justice, they can get secure email from there - maybe the delay is because that needs research and formal qualification as you don't want to expose +100k users to a backdoor.
Maybe - provide an authentic granny, buried at the same time is delivered. I am unclear as to whose GRandma it thas to be, but one assumes that there must be a farming business for busy lawyers.
(You can tell I have had a slow and mildly frustrating day although not for the obvious CV related problems).
I'll bet plaintiffs unable to print their documents would not be accepted as a reason for delaying.
I could go in with a workstation airgapped from their network (i.e. mine) and set up the facility for them in the time it takes for them to give me their email address.
They should be stung for this, and stung bad.
"I could go in with a workstation airgapped from their network (i.e. mine) and set up the facility for them in the time it takes for them to give me their email address."
Sigh. No you couldn't, because, as was made clear in the article, the office is physically closed. That's the problem.
I don't know if you've heard, but all non-essential government work has been halted.
We've got a similar issue - we'd love to send PDF bundles to the County Court but most courts still insist on printed bundles. To be fair the Judiciary would also love PDF bundles (they all have laptops and iPads now) - the sticking point appears to be the court clerks (who are the gatekeepers). We're trialling a system which is already used in a lot of the crown courts and some of the higher appeal courts - lets you ingest documents and then automatically indexes them, adds the appropriate cross-references between documents, etc. Then all parties can either just use a link to access the bundle directly in an interactive dataroom, or if you need to go old-school the bundle can be exported as a PDF (with automatic internal hyperlinks) or printed out for the terminally old-fashioned.
We're actually hoping to be able to use Covid-19 to force this issue; there was a change to the Civil Procedure Rules rushed out a few days ago which shows the Court Service is moving in the right direction but it's a chicken and the egg situation - no-one wants to be the first to use an electronic bundling system as until there is a successful precedent there is a risk that you could get censured by the Court for not having provided the documents in an approved form.
PS. One positive effect of Covid is that HMCTS have generously agreed that the email size limit for court service mailboxes will be lifted from 10mb to 25mb (except Judges who are already allowed to send/receive emails up to 150mb).
10 years ago I was buying a house and my solicitor advised me to buy a box file because "you're going to end up with a lot of paper". How right he was. PDF, email and not needing to print documents were very much possible then. Fast forward to buying another house only a few years back and nothing had really changed.
There was a story on The Reg a few months ago about courtrooms and Windows XP laptops. My main thought behind all this is - if you're talking about anything involving the law, and there is a heavily tried and tested system of doing things, people will be reluctant to change because of the gravity of what might happen if there's a cock-up.
I'm not suggesting I think this is the way forward. But if the ICO tried to do what the average person here thinks is simple (organising PDF's for example) - and cocked it up - they'd be labelled incompetent. That's the least of their concerns though as there could be larger implications for themselves or other people. So they can't win in this case (no pun intended).
You can thank an almighty public sector IT cock-up for that. Land Reg have been trying to do e-conveyancing for about 15 years now - every few years they spaff millions of pounds at a provider, spend a few years pissing it up the wall and then realise the proposed solution won't work. In 2002 it was called e-conveyancing, in 2008 it was called Chain Matrix, a few years ago it was going to be blockchain.
Last I heard the big sticking point was that transferring property requires a deed which has to be witnessed (rightly so, you wouldn't want to be able to transfer property that could be worth millions just on the say so of a single signature), and no-one has yet figured out a legally watertight way to do electronic signatures in such a way that someone can reliably witness the e-signature in realtime.
If I read it right, the fusty antiquated tribunal system asked the ICO - the watchdog in charge of regulating electronic use of data - to produce electronic bundles - PDFs and the like, a nearly ubiquitous option these days. And they couldn't.
I can't get my head around the fact that the ICO are supposed to be the technology people here, and they're not up to the level of the court system, which everyone thinks is stuck in the 19th century. The people in charge of regulating the use of computerised data couldn't actually produce computerised evidence.
The mind boggles. I can't even think of a decent metaphor for it. The best I've got is Microsoft making the next version of Office 365 only run on a Commodore PET.
Sadly, the real issue is the need to index and re-paginate the content of a bundle, not all of whose contents will have originated as PDFs, according to the requirements of that particular Court/Circuit, and, further, for that particular sitting. For the next sitting, the bundle will change, including the document indexing identifiers. Unless one has had the misfortune to participate, the need to manage documents at scale is not so obvious. As a Martian, one is horrified.
If one can get it right, then there is a lot of advantage. As to whose responsibility packaging items should properly be, that is a whole other question. Not being a qualified lawyer, one can not explain why organising a bundle is not a court responsibility, nor why said Court should not act as a document repository. Or perhaps it's an unquestioned tradition for participating lawyers to sort it out amongst themselves.
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