Advisor.ca | Technology
Jonathan Got, February 4th, 2025
Courts could use artificial intelligence (AI) to speed up probate and uncontested divorce applications, lawyers say.
The software can be trained on publicly available cases to learn how to flag problematic applications to a judge. But that will be difficult to achieve until probate processes are fully digitized.
About 90% of the probate cases Michael von Keitz sees are uncontested, said the senior associate lawyer at O’Sullivan Estate Lawyers LLP in Toronto.
If all the required documents and evidence are submitted and a judge doesn’t flag it as problematic, regular and small probate applications are usually processed within 15 and five business days respectively, the Ontario Ministry of the Attorney General said in an email. But that hasn’t been typical of lawyers’ experience.
Ontario committed $166 million over seven years to digitize its court system in 2021. The program will replace paper-based processes with an online platform including electronic filing, the Ontario Ministry of the Attorney General said. However, the digitization project’s first phase, which will go live in July, and the court case search tool which launched in 2020, both exclude probate cases, according to the ministry’s 2023-24 court services division annual report.
Digitizing documents and training a new AI model is labour intensive. With many Ontario courts understaffed, it’s unlikely they can spare the staff to implement the software under current conditions…
The best way forward in Ontario is to allow electronic wills. Currently, B.C. is the only jurisdiction in Canada that allows electronic wills. A digital document will be more portable; it can be seamlessly remitted to a court digitally.
Michael von Keitz, O’Sullivan Estate Lawyers LLP, Toronto
Physical documents can be lost. They can be placed into piles that aren’t seen for months.
