ECONOMIC AND LEGAL IMPACTS OF DIGITAL JUSTICE SYSTEMS: EVIDENCE FROM THE UK COURTS

Abstract

This paper focuses on the economic and legal impacts of the rise in the use of digital court systems in the United Kingdom based on a qualitative documentary study of digital justice reforms in the United Kingdom. The study is based on peer-reviewed academic literature, institutional assessments, and empirical research that was published in the recent years, 2020-2025, and investigates the impact of digital justice on procedural fairness, access to justice, institutional efficiency, and distribution of economic costs in the judicial system. The results suggest that, although digital justice reforms have produced quantifiable efficiency improvements, namely, the lowered delays, better schedule flexibility, and less dependence on physical court infrastructure, these gains are conditional and uneven in their distribution. The analysis shows that digital justice has not removed costs but rather it shifted them to the users of the court, particularly to low-income, litigants in person and digitally vulnerable people. In addition, the paper shows that procedural fairness and perceptions of judicial legitimacy are very sensitive to technological designs, type of hearing and user capacity and failures in these spheres have downstream economic implications including more appeals, adjournments and less compliance. Broadly, the paper eschews the conceptualisation of digital justice to constitute a legal-economic trade-off where efficiency, fairness and legitimacy are interdependent. Through its combination of legal and economic studies, this study adds to the growing body of literature on digitalisation of courts, and offers insights of practical use to policy makers on how to construct digital justice systems that are economically viable and legally entitled in the UK and other similar jurisdictions.