In April 2021, the Florida Supreme Court launched the Virtual Courtroom Directory, a website from which viewers can link to and watch virtual hearings and court livestreams of trials and oral arguments throughout the state. 

The idea for this directory germinated in May 2020, when Chief Justice Canady read about three states that had successfully developed live court event websites—Indiana, Michigan, and New Jersey.  Immediately, he directed the Office of the State Courts Administrator (OSCA) to determine whether Florida could construct something similar.  Reaching out to the court technology officers of those states, Mr. Roosevelt Sawyer, the state courts technology officer under OSCA, learned about how those websites were built, how they are updated, how long it took, and how much it cost to develop these systems, and which videoconferencing platforms they use.  Armed with this information, along with other tips and “lessons learned” that these states generously shared, Mr. Sawyer was given approval to proceed.  In under a year—with the indispensable support of the supreme court’s deputy director of public information, Ms Tricia Knox, who took the lead in this effort; the vendor, who developed the website; and the Florida court technology officers of the four circuits that participated in the pilot project (the Second, Eleventh, Fourteenth, and Seventeenth)—he was able to bring the chief justice’s vision to fruition. 

Not surprisingly, the process was not without a few hiccups, and Ms Knox and Mr. Sawyer agree that, before they could go live with the directory, they had to overcome three significant challenges.  The first two were getting the livestreams up and running, and creating the YouTube channels, for each participating court (many courts are now using the Zoom to YouTube feature for livestreaming).  The third was providing automatic live captioning to ensure accessibility for viewers with disabilities (this challenge, the greatest of the three, was surmounted when Zoom enabled its closed captioning feature).               

Although the Virtual Courtroom Directory was conceived and delivered during the pandemic, the health crisis did not create any considerable obstacles to its development—in fact, COVID-19 could be said to have expedited the development of the directory.  To ensure the safe continuation of court operations and proceedings statewide during the pandemic, Chief Justice Canady issued administrative orders expanding the authority of judges to conduct proceedings remotely, both from courtrooms and from other locations.  Because so many courts turned to livestreaming their court procedures, the ground was richly prepared for building the virtual courtroom directory. 

The Virtual Courtroom Directory website includes search features and a Florida map indicating the counties whose courts are “live now” and available for viewing.

Currently available on the platform are proceedings from the supreme court, the five district courts of appeal, and eight circuits that are actively streaming on a regular basis (the Second, Seventh, Eighth, Ninth, Eleventh, Fourteenth, Seventeenth, and Twentieth; the most active counties are Leon, Bay, Gulf, Washington, Glades, Collier, Alachua, Miami-Dade, Orange, Osceola, St. Johns, Broward, Flagler, Putnam, Volusia, and Flagler).  Proceeding types vary by court, but they include first appearances, arraignments, criminal pre-trial hearings, violation of probation hearings, criminal and civil trials, and oral arguments.  Viewers can search for a proceeding by location (county) or by judge.  “Now that Florida has a fully vetted system in place, any Florida court that is already livestreaming can quickly be onboarded,” Mr. Sawyer noted.  

Florida’s Virtual Courtroom Directory is one of several major supreme court efforts, over the last 40 years, to bolster the accessibility of court proceedings.  Arguably the most groundbreaking endeavor transpired in the late 1970s: after a one-year pilot allowing news cameras into state courtrooms, the supreme court—based on a comprehensive survey of judges, attorneys, jurors, litigants, and court staff—concluded that, rather than causing harm, cameras confer a great benefit by making the judicial process accessible and transparent to the public; this conclusion, permanently written into the rules of court in a unanimous 1979 opinion, propelled a national movement that eventually brought cameras into most state courts in the country.  In another cutting-edge effort to provide greater access to court proceedings, in 1997, the court began livestreaming its oral arguments, opening the supreme court courtroom to anyone with an internet connection (since February 2018, oral arguments can also be viewed on Facebook Live, making them readily available to social media users).  Now, with the launch of the Virtual Courtroom Directory, the public, no matter where they are located, “have a front-row seat” in all Florida’s appellate courts and in many of its trial courts, as Chief Justice Canady remarked.  Through the development of the Virtual Courtroom Directory, Florida once again underscores its longstanding commitment to openness and transparency.