This article first appeared in January 2021 as part of the “Asked and Answered with Lerners LLP” series. It describes how Ontario’s civil courts were coping in the first year of the pandemic and is kept here as a record of that period. The full piece can be read below.
When COVID-19 arrived in March 2020, law firms sent their people home and the courts did something they had resisted for decades: they went remote. Within months, hearings that had always meant a trip to the courthouse were being conducted by videoconference. The Superior Court of Justice held more than 74,000 virtual hearings between March and November 2020, and the Court of Appeal decided over 800 appeals that year without expecting a backlog once the pandemic ended.
The province suspended limitation periods and procedural deadlines in the spring of 2020; that suspension ended on September 14, 2020. The courts began returning to in-person hearings in the fall, then moved most matters back online when the second wave arrived, reserving in-person attendance for the most urgent cases.
The lasting change was technological. Zoom and similar tools, long overdue in Ontario’s courtrooms, became ordinary, and the Chief Justices of all three Ontario courts credited the bar with rising to the occasion so that clients could still be heard.
A note on currency: this is a snapshot of early 2021. Court practice has moved on considerably since then. For the current rules on virtual and in-person attendance, consult the Superior Court of Justice’s practice directions, or get in touch.