E-Mail Trumps "Snail Mail" - A Welcome Initiative
Last week, Mr. Justice Brown released an Endorsement involving an Application for Confirming of Resealing of Appointment, in which he directed the Estates Registrar to offer to Applicants for Certificates of Appointment the option of communicating with the Estates Office by e-mail.
Lawyers with experience in obtaining Certificates of Appointment of Estate Trustee (and other related probate documents) are familiar with the standard form corrections notice issued by the Toronto Region Estates Office, and the inherent delays that may result from dealing with such correction notices. Refer to our firm blog (by Natalia Angelini) and podcast (by David Smith and me) for further information on this issue. The practice to date has been for the Toronto Estates Office to send a standard form corrections notice to the Applicant which identifies the deficiencies in the filed materials. Frequently there arises a back-and-forth between the Applicant and the Estates Court via regular mail while the Applications are rectified and processed.
The issue before the Court on this matter was whether the Toronto Region Estates Office could communicate by e-mail with Applicants for Certificate of Appointments to inform them of their corrections, and to receive corrections from them. As Mr. Justice Brown remarked in his Endorsement, the Court is relying on "snail mail" to conduct its business in 2009. He suggested that real access to justice requires the provision of a variety of ways to communicate, and; "more fundamentally, the time has come to recognize the stark reality that our court ... lags unacceptably behind in the use of electronic communication with our court users". The Court concluded that it could not find anything in the Rules of Civil Procedure prohibiting reliance on electronic communications, and therefore on a "go forward" basis the Court should offer every Applicant the option of communicating by e-mail with the Toronto Region Estates Office in respect of corrections to deficiencies in the Application.
The Rules of Civil Procedure should be interpreted to secure the "most expeditious" determination of every civil proceeding (Rule 1.04(1)). This welcome and progressive initiative should go a long way towards realizing that objective.
Sarah Hyndman Fitzpatrick
Sarah Hyndman Fitzpatrick - Click here for more information on Sarah Fitzpatrick.
