The judiciary digitized

Step1: All case information should be digitized and available via the web.
Step2: Attendance for judges should be automatically logged when they get into the chair. This would allow the system to monitor working hours for the judges. Needless to say, this would require a database record for each judge.
It starts to get interesting, because you would need a record for each case and you could link the judge to the case using techniques most DBAs perform in alcohol induced sleep

Step3: The judge walks into the room, keys in his id, pulls up the cases for the day, and starts with the first one. The "clerk" accurately records the elapsed time for the case. When the case terminates, the judge pronounces his decision which is recorded under the case. Search techniques will allow precedents to be pulled up later. Time for the case is recorded and average time to get to judgement is recorded. This will be used in future scheduling of cases for that judge.

This system has several advantages. It records the performance of the judge, the precedents used in the case, the precedents that this case sets and also whether the plaintiff has decided to go in for an appeal.

Over a period of time, the appeals court process can simply look over the salient points of the judgements and choose to hear arguments based only on new evidence or ignored evidence or if the judgement appears to have fundamental flaws.

Step4: The digitizing, and subsequent recording of information has to be done by a professional services firm with liabilities that are market driven (Any evidence of collusion between the firm's officials and the judge would be reflected by a drop in share prices and punitive fines by the industry)

Step5: Over a period of time, we build up repositories of information that reflect the performance of the judge, the police officials who built the case and the prosecutor who made the case. It becomes a tool for judging promotions, appointments to specific cases, postings etc. In other words, we now have a system that can hold people accountable for their performance and reward the ones who are truly outstanding and fix lapses to account for the laggards.

Step6: We can mine the case to see how the legal and law enforcement system needs to be strengthened (essentially perform data mining on data to make the system efficient with each new case)

Processes and technology combine to remove much of the inefficiency of the system. The profession starts to gravitate more towards the effectiveness of the parties involved rather than the paperwork. And any system that rewards efficiency, effectiveness , results and is seen to be accountable naturally attracts the bright and the talented to join the stream.

Sounds a lot like a pipe dream. But who knows, if you don't dream, you would never build anything.