TBA Law Blog


Posted by: Stacey Shrader Joslin on Sep 3, 2021

During the COVID-19 pandemic, the U.S. judicial system faced unprecedented challenges, quickly adapting to new health and safety requirements and navigating court closures while ensuring that litigants still had access to the courts. To explore the impact of these challenges, Thomson Reuters surveyed nearly 240 court professionals — judges and chief justices, magistrates, court administrators, attorneys and clerks — at the state, county and municipal levels. A new report “The Impacts of the Pandemic on State & Local Courts” distills those responses, offering insight into how well courts pivoted to remote hearings, how remote hearings impacted access to justice, how case backlogs were impacted, which technology solutions are most needed, and what hearings might look like going forward.