An article of last week on my Google+ site (Norwich CPS tests tablet computers as a step towards paperless courts) sounded a cautious welcome for the plan by the Crown Prosecution Service to send out all the documents for criminal cases on HP tablets. I referred also to a similar exercise being undertaken by Australian firm Corrs which, I implied without actually saying so, has probably had rather more experience at managing documents electronically, as well as a more controlled environment consisting only of their own lawyers. I do not know who, if anybody, is helping the CPS on its initiative, but I anticipated difficulties even if the technology was adequately specified and properly managed case-by-case.

It has not taken long for the intended recipients of this technology bounty to react against the proposal, as the Law Society Gazette reports in an article called Firms in revolt over CPS “paperless” plan. In addition to difficulties arising from the technology itself and from the context in which it is to be used, solicitors complain that the change “will simply transfer costs from the CPS to the defence”. A letter from 30 criminal firms to the Director of Public Prosecutions says “We are happy to assist in changes which generate efficiencies, but see no reason why the costs should be borne by us, while we enjoy no corresponding reward”.

It has to be said that the civil service has a fairly unimpressive record for delivering technology to itself, never mind to those with whom it deals. Lack of technology nous is compounded, usually, by that blissful ignorance of commercial pressures which is characteristic of public servants everywhere. They are not good, either, at the human aspects of change, relying on their monopoly status as the only source of publicly-funded work to hand down by diktat changes which deserve a more consensual approach. As a rough and ready rule, when a civil service project is given a painfully clunky name, in this case Transforming Through Technology (T3), it can generally be considered dead before it hits the ground.

I suspect also that this one needs a longer trial than has been allowed.

The proposal is a good one in theory, and one which, inevitably, I support. Change management, however, requires more than merely making an announcement and adopting new methods for what is, as one of the interviewed lawyers said,”a system that we don’t even know will work”.

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