U.S. Supreme Court moves toward electronic filing.

• Position: LEGAL - Brief article

No one would ever call the U.S. Supreme Court an early adopter of technology. While the rest of the legal community has had to embrace new information technologies, the court has remained a paper-based system, but it is preparing to take some baby steps into the digital age.

On December 31, Chief Justice John Roberts released his "2014 Year-End Report on the Federal Judiciary" in which he announced that the court is developing its own electronic case filing and case management system, which may be operational as early as 2016.

The court's slowness to deploy new technology directly reflects its nature. Roberts described the court's role as "passive and circumscribed," making it only logical that it "focus on those innovations that, first and foremost, advance their primary goal of fairly and efficiently adjudicating cases through the application of law."

According to the report, "The federal courts, including the Supreme Court, must often introduce new technologies at a more measured pace than other institutions, especially those in private industry. They will sometimes seem more guarded...