A new online portal designed to streamline access to Ontario's court system is leaving some lawyers struggling with unpredictable delays and new obstacles in pursuing their cases, they say, months after the platform's initial rollout.
Toronto launched the Ontario Courts Community Portal in the fall to enable people to file documents, pay fees and find virtual links to court hearings in non-criminal matters, including Supreme Court family matters, civil matters, small claims matters, bankruptcy, District Court matters and enforcement matters, as well as family matters in provincial courts.
Digital access to criminal matters is slated to expand next year in a second phase, and the Ontario government hopes the system it touts as more transparent and accessible will be rolled out across the province by 2030.
While welcoming the push for a more modern court system, some lawyers say the new system is unintuitive and difficult to navigate, and its mounting problems are slowing down the judicial process and risk eroding public trust in the courts.
Tasks that once took a day or two—such as drafting a motion or obtaining a statement of claim issued in a lawsuit—can now take weeks, delays that then snowball as the case progresses, they say.
Meanwhile, the new portal is not fully synchronized with the Supreme Court's mandatory document sharing platform and may not display every case in which a lawyer is involved, attorneys say. It is also no longer possible to search for a case online using the name of one of the participating parties, a feature that was available on the portal's predecessor.
Cases can be found by case number, but the only way to get that number is to go to the public terminal at the courthouse, which is “significantly more cumbersome” and undermines the principle of open court, said Jay Nathwani, a Toronto-based construction lawyer.
“If you're going to roll out a new online portal, it's reasonable to expect it to perform at least as well, if not better, than the system it replaces,” Nathwani said in a recent interview.
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“We shouldn’t accept new systems that make life harder for everyone.”
Nathwani's firm submitted a planning application for the proposal in October, but by mid-December it was still not marked as booked on the online portal, he said. According to him, no materials can be filed until the hearing appears on the portal, and such a backlog disrupts the lawyers' work schedules.
His office also found that claims filed through the portal were not filed promptly, which is especially troubling as legal statutes of limitations, the maximum time to begin a lawsuit, approach, he said.
Even though claims are backdated to the day they were filed, lawyers may not be informed of an important issue with the document until it is too late, he said.
“We used to be able to get feedback right away” and fix it before the deadline, but that’s no longer the case, he said.
“It's the kind of thing that keeps lawyers up at night.”
His firm files well before the deadline, he said, “but this is a problem that shouldn't exist (and) didn't exist before.”
Urgent claims can still be filed in person, on paper, but the court has strict criteria for what it considers urgent, said Eric Sherkin, a commercial lawyer in Toronto.
Filing claims online now requires long and unpredictable waits, he said in a recent interview, adding that he has to wait up to four weeks for some claims to be issued after they are filed.
The uncertainty also extends to customers, he said.
“It creates some distrust in the system if their lawyers… it’s unclear when they’ll even be able to get documents back from the court,” he said.
Sherkin also recalled a tense morning trying to access his scheduled hearing in civil court, where attorneys go to outline longer, more complex motions.
The hearing was marked as scheduled on the portal, but neither he nor opposing counsel received the video conference link, and the case was scheduled to begin in half an hour. According to him, when he contacted the court staff, they advised him to look at the portal, but the link was nowhere to be found.
Sherkin eventually said the staff sent him everything he needed, but by then the hearing had already begun. Fortunately, his case has not yet been adjudicated, but things could have gone differently, he said.
“What happens is I just don't get it, no one checks the email and I miss my scheduled hearing and now I have to report to my client… who knew I was in court that morning to set a date for the motion,” he said.
Lawyers are having to reconsider some aspects of their practice in light of these “troubles,” Sherkin said.
“I'm sure things will improve, but right now I'm just aware that … it's gotten slower rather than faster,” he said.
The Prosecutor General's Office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The Ontario Bar said the new portal has been well received by its members and there is ongoing communication between the courts, the province and the profession regarding its implementation.
Any issues raised by the association on behalf of its members were quickly resolved, said Kathy Commisso, the organization's president.
“There are some changes, some growing pains, some things happening, but they are well worth the positive impact of this new platform,” Commisso said.
“The general feedback we have received from our members regarding the OBA is that it has been… one of the smoothest transitions, if not the smoothest, in terms of the digital transformation that we have seen in the justice sector.”
