Southeast Asian courts are scrambling to catch up with the rapid rise of cybercrime and artificial intelligence (AI), with Supreme Court (SC) associate justice Jose Midas P. Marquez warning that justice systems risk being outpaced by technology if they do not adapt.
The project seeks to integrate electronic systems into court operations, which includes tools for verifying case details and managing court records. It also plans to turn paper records into digital files.
Starting July 1, 2025, the Supreme Court (SC) will begin transitioning to electronic filing (eFiling) for certain petitions and motions through the eCourt PH app, which is available on the Philippine Judiciary Platform (PJP), a unified online portal for court services.
The app, which was inspired by the Guilford-Zimmerman Temperament Survey, was adapted to suit the Philippine context to detect warning signs of burnout.
Using Scriptix, an AI- driven transcription platform, participating courts reported an average 50% reduction in transcription time, with some achieving up to 80%.
Currently, more than 2,700 trial courts are required to submit at least 23 types of reports to the SC. The data hub allows judges and court personnel to directly encode and submit data online.
The rules introduce Electronic Notaries Public (ENPs), who are authorized to perform notarial acts for individuals located anywhere in the Philippines and, in certain cases, even abroad.
The Supreme Court (SC) conducted a training session last Jan. 8 to 9 for the first prototype of an electronic Court Management System for trial courts under the eCourt System Version 2.0 project.
The Supreme Court (SC) has reiterated that using online chat logs and videos as evidence does not violate the right to privacy if they are used to determine if a crime has been committed.
