The As­sem­bly of South­ern Lawyers is call­ing on the Ju­di­cia­ry to re­view its cur­rent sys­tem of vir­tu­al hear­ings at Dis­trict (Mag­is­trate’s) Courts.

In a let­ter sent to Chief Jus­tice Ivor Archie yes­ter­day, the or­gan­i­sa­tion’s Pres­i­dent Michael Rooplal praised the Ju­di­cia­ry’s in­tro­duc­tion and in­creased re­liance of the tech­nol­o­gy dur­ing the on­go­ing COVID-19 pan­dem­ic but not­ed some con­cerns over how it was be­ing man­aged for Dis­trict Courts.

“We have re­ceived sev­er­al com­plaints of at­tor­neys and lit­i­gants hav­ing to wait for sev­er­al hours in some in­stances for their mat­ters to be called by the rel­e­vant Dis­trict Court Judge,” Rooplal said, as he not­ed that the sit­u­a­tion has had a neg­a­tive ef­fect on ef­fi­cien­cy and pro­duc­tiv­i­ty.

Rooplal not­ed that as some court users do not have tech­no­log­i­cal ac­cess, they are forced to come to at­tor­neys’ of­fices and spend hours wait­ing on their cas­es to be called.

Rooplal sug­gest­ed that con­sid­er­a­tion be giv­en to adopt­ing the case man­age­ment sys­tem used in civ­il courts where­by par­ties are giv­en set times for the their hear­ings be­fore a ju­di­cial of­fi­cer.

He said that his or­gan­i­sa­tion was will­ing to hold dis­cus­sions with oth­er stake­hold­ers such as the Law As­so­ci­a­tion over the is­sue.

Guardian Me­dia un­der­stands Rooplal did not re­ceive a re­sponse up to late yes­ter­day.

Con­tact­ed yes­ter­day, lawyers prac­tic­ing in courts in oth­er ar­eas of Trinidad con­firmed that they had been ex­pe­ri­enc­ing sim­i­lar is­sues. Most polled sug­gest­ed that the civ­il court mod­el sug­gest­ed by Rooplal should be con­sid­ered.

Since the start of the pan­dem­ic in March, the Ju­di­cia­ry has grad­u­al­ly moved to vir­tu­al hear­ings in most cas­es in­clud­ing judge-alone tri­als with phys­i­cal ap­pear­ances at court build­ings on­ly oc­cur­ring in rare and ex­cep­tion­al cir­cum­stances.