By Ben Solis
Staff Writer
Posted: April 23, 2020 2:36 PM

Despite the inherent hardships the new coronavirus outbreak has imposed on residents and state government, the courts have risen to the challenge by making leaps in innovation that it otherwise may have rejected in a pre-COVID-19 world.

That's what Supreme Court Chief Justice Bridget McCormack told me in an interview earlier today. We discussed how her court and the lower courts have been handling the crisis and what she means when she says that the COVID-19 crisis was the disruption the courts needed to embrace much-needed change.

"Lawyers and judges for lots of cultural reasons, some traditional reasons, for some fundamental values reasons are slow to change and innovate," Ms. McCormack said. "We're not necessarily known as being an agile industry, and as a result we've been able to resist a lot of innovation that's come for other industries."

The innovation in question is the judiciary's transition toward holding its proceedings online through videoconference tools like Zoom. In the case of the Supreme Court, Ms. McCormack and her colleagues have been holding oral arguments on the platform and livestreaming them on YouTube for all to see.

The Supreme Court plans to hold oral arguments via Zoom and broadcast to YouTube for the third time on May 6.

Ms. McCormack said the courts have had the technology to take its business into a virtual setting for some time, but those traditions and cultural barriers prevented them from making a court-wide jump into using them fulltime.

My upcoming piece in Thursday's Michigan Report goes into greater detail about the experience thus far and some of the challenges that have arisen in the process. Ms. McCormack also explains why the judiciary will continue the path of holding virtual court in some capacity once the pandemic crisis is over.

But overall, the switch to virtual proceedings has been a smooth transition, and the judiciary's ability to immediately change how it operates says a lot about how equipped the courts were to make that change in the first place.

In a tweet, the Supreme Court on Thursday highlighted the fact that through April 1 and April 17, Michigan's trial courts held more than 6,800 hearings remotely for a total of nearly 30,000 hours of proceedings.

Considering Ms. McCormack has long since been an advocate for criminal justice reform, it makes sense that she would be as open to if not a driving force behind the virtual solutions that have kept the courts open to the public through a harrowing and difficult set of circumstances.

It is commendable that access to this vital institution remains for the most part unimpeded by a public health crisis that has upended almost every facet of our daily lives.