Anna Silinskaya, Principal Associate of the Dispute Resolution practice at Capital Legal Services, discusses how online hearings in Russia have changed over the last two years.

Online hearings in courts of general jurisdictions are not widespread yet, but their advantages are quite obvious. Not everyone is willing to entrust procedural documents to the postal service, and a trip to another region to attend a court hearing which is sure to end with an adjournment is almost always not worth it.

Based on our experience, both online hearings and online filing can be a big help to a lawyer. However, life is full of mishaps that occur no matter how well the parties are technically equipped and how clearly the rules of the proceedings are defined.

For example, in 2021, we, like many other lawyers, ran into a situation where the Intellectual Property Court was unable to hold a scheduled online hearing because its network went down – not just the Internet, but the phone network as well.

It is hard to describe the confusion when it is impossible to connect to a hearing or make a call to the court to find out what is going on. Of course, the situation was just as stressful for the court as well, and all hearings scheduled for that day had to be moved.

A hybrid hearing, where one party is present in person and the other one joins via web conferencing, can also be a challenge. For example, the equipment could be placed in such a way that the parties do not see each other and the judge needs to manually rotate the camera so the parties can make eye contact while speaking.

All these difficulties illustrate the main problem with the system of online hearings in the courts of general jurisdiction: the need to upgrade technical equipment of the courts.