Shanghai No.1 Intermediate People’s Court has launched the first Internet court in China to turn the traditional face-to-face trial into a “keyboard-to-keyboard” one of the information age.

This Internet lawsuit service platform covers various convenient legal services and the entire legal proceedings, including online registering, online inquiries, contacts with judge, online mediation, and online exchange of evidence. (ChinaTechNews)

Lots of questions about this, but a couple of threshold comments based on preliminary information.

1. Don’t mistake “Internet court” with “Court involved with Internet-related cases.” There are a lot of disputes that are simple, straightforward, and relatively easy to deal with via electronic exchange of information. With the exception of domain name dispute cases, these are generally not Internet or IT-related cases.

2. As long as this platform is limited to appropriate cases, the efficiency gains with respect to time and cost can be significant. In a perfect world, this frees up judicial resources for other cases.

3. In light of strong recent political pressure on judges to settle cases, I wonder how mediation will be handled in an online platform? Perhaps the litigants get a standard email that essentially says “Try to mediate. You will receive this email again in six weeks asking you to try a second time.”

4. I am very interested in how evidence is evaluated in online systems. I would assume that documents can be sent in via PDF files, with originals mailed to the court later. Will the judges just disregard electronic evidence in favor of hard copy docs? If so, will this mean that the amount of time saved will be a lot less than one would think?

5. I assume this is a pilot project and not necessarily the wave of the future. We’ll see how it works in practice. I have a feeling that a lot of folks, when faced with any sort of new online system, will freak out and panic, thinking that they are getting a crappy public service. On the other hand, it is slightly amusing to think about some old lawyer out there struggling to figure out how to submit docs, etc. Lucky for the old folks, tech-savvy recent grads in China are very cheap these days.

If anyone has experience with such a system in another country, I’d be interested to hear how it works.