This article by Paul Magrath, Head of Product Development and Online Content at ICLR (incorporated Council of Law Reporting), provides a survey of 10 key technological developments that, over time, have contributed towards or affected our understanding of the administration of justice. Developments involving digitisation, the internet, and artificial intelligence (AI) are dealt with in greater depth, with a particular focus on recent AI developments at ICLR.

Based on a presentation given at the BIALL Annual Conference in July 2022, this article by Paul Magrath provides an overview of how technology including artificial intelligence (AI) is transforming legal practice and the conduct of litigation, followed by more detailed consideration by way of a case study of ICLR's development of its AI-driven search tool, Case Genie. The article examines the problems that it was designed to solve, particularly the legal researcher's anxiety over ‘unknown unknowns’, and the options for further development of the technology and its application in other areas.

The coronavirus pandemic has had a profound effect on the conduct of legal business generally, but nowhere perhaps more drastically than on the conduct of litigation in the courts. This article by Paul Magrath considers how the judiciary, court services and practitioners of England and Wales have been working together to continue to administer justice in spite of the restrictions necessitated by the pandemic, and the challenges that have been faced in managing court information and reporting court proceedings.

This article by Paul Magrath considers the role of law reporting not only as a service in support of the administration of justice and legal education, but also in the wider context of open justice, transparency and public legal information. It traces the history of law reporting and considers the pros and cons of the more comprehensive publication of judgments of the senior courts made possible by digitisation and the internet, in comparison with the more selective approach adopted in the past. The article is loosely based on a presentation given at the annual conference of the British and Irish Association of Law Librarians held in Bournemouth in June 2019.

This article by Paul Magrath examines the tensions between data protection and transparency in the context of a long overdue digital revolution in the courts of England and Wales. Many traditional hearings are being replaced by virtual or video-conference type hearings, and may in time be dealt with by an online court. There are concerns that open justice may suffer. Yet any attempt to remedy this with more transparent scrutiny of court information will need to conform to the stricter data protection regime under GDPR as well as respecting the privacy of litigants and the presumption of innocence. The author is Head of Product Development and Online Content with ICLR and a trustee of the Transparency Project.

This article is written by Paul Magrath who is the Head of Product Development and Online Content at the Incorporated Council of Law Reporting for England and Wales (ICLR). His article explores the issues surrounding the custodianship of those public legal documents, such as court judgments, which form primary sources of law but which may also contain private data, and looks at the way custodians of such data can also act as gatekeepers, enhancing or inhibiting access by the public as well as more specialised users. It expands upon an article published by Infolaw.co.uk entitled “Custodians and gatekeepers: maintaining access to public legal information”, and refers to recent case law involving the tension between information in the public domain and the individual's privacy and “right to be forgotten” by search engines. The article also looks at how court documents are made accessible in other jurisdictions and imagines how things might be improved in our own courts, before concluding that the model of a not-for-profit organisation, such as the ICLR or BAILII (the British and Irish Legal Information Institute), may work as well if not better than public or private management of judgments and other legal public information.