The Supreme Court has issued directions for sharing of digitised copies of paper books with Advocates-on-Record (AoRs), in order to facilitate the lawyers and judges during court hearings.
On January 25,the project will commence on a pilot basis from the Chief Justice of India’s courtroom.
The reason for taking this step was taken as the paper books being used for court hearings were not uniform, leading to inconveniences and loss of time.
A notice issued by the Court’s Registrar reads that issue pertaining to variation in reference to page numbers of the scanned and digitized paper books during court proceedings is important.
The Court Registrar stated variation often cause grave inconvenience and loss of invaluable time of the Court and the members of the bar.
The best way to address the concern is sharing of digitised pleadings which would act as a remedial measure to address these concerns.
The digitally circulated paper books would be segregated into three separate portable document format (PDF) files, for petitions, additional documents and office reports.
The Registrar’s notice stated that the bookmarks in these PDFs would be standardized and all steps would be taken to maintain in seriatim chronology of documents.
As per the notie, the PDFs shall be accessible on the e-Filing dashboard.The instructions on the usage of these documents have also been provided in the notice.
In case of any difficulties in using this facility, counsel have been urged to write to: scan.paperbook@gmail.com.