Justice delayed is justice denied. That old legal maxim, first attributed to the British Statesmen William Gladstone, has been passed down from the 19th century in the form of words printed in ink on paper. If you had a mind to, you could find it countless books, journals, newspaper articles and legal briefs. It would be real and true because you could touch it. This is the nature of law. Things are legal if they exist in the physical world. Laws are written on parchment, signed with pen and ink and attested to with a stamp or seal. Here is the great irony. The need to have a physical document as legal proof has become the single greatest impediment to timely justice. In courthouses all across America, the shear volume of legal transactions combined with the requirement that a single piece of paper be the proof of a land transaction, divorce, child custody, criminal sentence has brought justice to a screeching halt. In Seattle, they have solved that problem by creating the "Electronic Court Record". It is a remarkable accomplishment, not because of the technological advancements, but because of the huge paradigm shift required to accept a computer record as a legal proof. This is how they did it.
