"We should not wait for that to happen. We should work out how to take advantage of these developments to produce innovative change and increase efficiencies."

The Federal Court of Australia is tantalisingly close – 98 per cent – to having all documents filed electronically. There are almost 35,000 files with around 393,846 documents on its market-leading electronic court file, which is approaching its third year.

Chief justice James Allsop said it had "laid the groundwork for the development of systems" to move to wholly paperless courts.

Its digital court program is tackling nutty problems such as getting appeal books, which can run to hundreds of pages, into electronic format.

"Research is being undertaken in this area as part of a 'Digital Hearings' project led by judges and court staff, who have shadowed work undertaken in the courtroom and sought to understand the needs of judges when managing the flow of information during a hearing, for example in high-volume matters," said Chief Justice Allsop.

"The aim is to understand the way the court can deploy artificial intelligence to its advantage in order to support judges in analysing large and complex bodies of technical data."

But progress may have been slowed by the huge undertaking following the back-office merger of the Federal Court with the Family and Federal Circuit Courts in July.

In February, Mr Soden gave a Senate committee a flavour of the enormous gap between the courts' technological capabilities that the Federal Court is working to bridge: the Family Court was still operating on Lotus Notes.


Another big challenge will be bringing the bar on board.

Barristers must shake off paper

Sydney barrister Philippe Doyle Gray has run a paperless practice since 2015, but that is a rarity.

"The problem with lawyers and technology is it doesn't really matter how good solutions are, we are all extremely busy and it is so difficult to change the way in which we are going to practise law," he warned the NSW Law Society's landmark inquiry into the Future of Law and Innovation in the Profession, which released its report on Tuesday.

"It may be tempting for senior lawyers to leave the problem of implementing technology to practise the law to the next generation, but the price for doing so may be ridicule."

He operates in the court room from his iPad, and has taught magistrates how to better use theirs.

Preventing cost blow-outs with culture

Chief justice Allsop said the court's technical capabilities had also allowed it to undergo its fundamental structural reorganisation two years ago; moving from the old docketing system of randomly allocating cases to the next judge in a rotation, to lists based on specialisations.

There are nine speciality areas in the National Court Framework, including commercial and corporations, federal crime and taxation, each with simplified practice notes that encourage lawyers to approach matters more efficiently and flexibly.

"It is only through such culture change that the blow-out of costs will be prevented," he said.