Members of the public, litigants and lawyers in Toronto will be able to access far more of the court system online starting next week, as the province launches the first phase of what is set to be an Ontario-wide portal.
The Ontario Courts Public Portal is set to go live on Tuesday and will allow people to file documents, pay fees and find virtual links for court hearings online.
At first it is limited to Toronto matters and excludes criminal cases, but expands digital access for Superior Court family, civil, small claims, bankruptcy, Divisional Court and enforcement cases, as well as provincial court family cases.
Phase 2 will include criminal matters, with a planned launch in 2027, and a rollout provincewide for the $166-million system being eyed for 2030, Attorney General Doug Downey said in an interview.
"It's going to create a significantly more accessible and robust system that will help (the public) have transparency and access their own court cases, filings, paying for things, getting documents out of the system," he said.
People will still have the option of using paper because the approach is "digital first, not digital only," he said.
The COVID-19 pandemic thrust the courts into the digital age at a much quicker pace than it had previously seen, but Downey said he had court modernization in his sights before then.
"When I was a court clerk many, many years ago, it struck me that you couldn't pay for filings with a credit card," he said.
"When I became the attorney general in 2019 you still couldn't pay for a filing with a credit card – very basic, entry-level-type stuff. So I was on a mission to modernize the system."
Superior Court Chief Justice Geoffrey Morawetz, who approached Downey four years ago with a request for the government to procure an off-the-shelf system to digitize the courts, said in a speech last month that this new portal – the end result of that request – is a historic transformation.
"Long overdue, this new digital system will replace our currently disconnected technologies with one integrated, seamless platform across all areas of law," he said.
"This is a truly user-centred product for everyone: the judiciary, staff, as well as the lawyers and parties before Ontario’s trial courts."
Downey said he believes procuring the new platform from Thomson Reuters, which was awarded the contract in 2023, instead of trying to start from scratch allowed the portal to get up and running relatively quickly.
"My approach was that, let's apply our expertise to what we need from it to customize it, as opposed to start from a blank slate and start coding," he said.
The former Liberal government spent years trying to implement a court information management system with many of the same goals of allowing electronic access to court records, but abandoned it in 2013 after spending $10.3 million.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Oct. 10, 2025.