Mr. Ponton, I believe you have a filter turned on in the video settings.

If you're not a lawyer or you haven't gone to court during the pandemic, your image of online court might be this viral video.

Can you hear me, Judge?

Where that lawyer in Texas got a cat filter stuck on his face.

I don't know how to remove it.

I've got my assistant here.

She's trying to, but I'm prepared to go forward with it.

I'm here live.

I'm not a cat.

The whole thing was funny and quotable.

It made for a great The Way We Live Now moment.

But most online court proceedings, especially civil court proceedings, where people try to do things like fight eviction or figure out child support, are both more prosaic and more important.

It's the difference between, you know, whether or not you're going to lose your home,

whether or not your wages are going to be garnished, how much child support you're going to have to

provide.

That's lawyer could see Anaki.

She's been studying how civil courts moved online during the pandemic.

These are really critical human financial issues that can

affect health, that can affect finances, that can affect family. And it's really key that the

system meets the needs of those people.

What Katsia and her colleagues at the Pew Foundation found was a system transformed.

For instance, being able to sign into Zoom instead of schlepping to a courthouse helped a lot more people make their court dates.

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