Technology has helped keep the legal industry afloat amid the COVID-19 pandemic. It also allowed Judge Jeanne Robison to hop in a kayak to serve justice.

The Salt Lake City Justice Court judge uses the WebEx online conference system to hold court hearings on the banks of rivers in the Utah city, near camps where homeless people live, she said Friday during a virtual discussion at the ninth annual Clio Cloud Conference on innovative court practices.

During the hearings that she called "kayak court," Judge Robison would sit in her rocking kayak as defendants and their lawyers stand or sit on the bank of a river, a prosecutor appears on a smartphone screen and a judicial assistant writes out court orders by hand before updating the court's electronic system. The experience has taught her that a court is not a building, but a service.

"We're just trying to remove barriers to access," Judge Robison said. "If you have a minor offense, we can handle it on the river. You're not going to get any lesser sanction than if you were a sheltered person who had a case before me."

As the pandemic increasingly limited physical access to courthouses, some locales adapted through innovations as simple as digitizing and offering online various court forms that were traditionally filled out by hand, said Brian McGrath Sr., senior vice president of operations for software provider Tyler Technologies.

Other courts have looked to digitizing processes that typically have been handled by paper, such as case initiation forms for matters like divorces and hearing or payment reminders, McGrath said. The reminders may even be more effective through a text message, while entering the data electronically saves the effort of a court employee later needing to physically enter the information, he added.

"There's a litany of solutions across the country that we see being leveraged," McGrath said.

While medical operating rooms look vastly different today than they did 200 years ago, courtrooms look largely the same, save for cameras, McGrath noted. He believes courts have plenty of space for operating more efficiently and inexpensively through the use of technology, such as by offering dispute resolution services virtually in areas such as family law or by resolving scheduling challenges through the use of software rather than via vacation notices.

"There's quite a bit more we can do, well and above things such as virtual hearings," McGrath said.

--Editing by Steven Edelstone.