The fact that meetings and conferences are held via video chat has long been part of everyday professional life in many industries due to the corona pandemic. However, video chats are not so common at courts. However, things are slowly starting to move. After Munich, civil litigation will also be conducted online at the Ebersberg district court from this year on. An innovation that – not only due to the pandemic – makes perfect sense, as Manfred Kastlmeier, judge and press spokesman at the Freising District Court, believes. In Freising, however, there are currently no plans to switch to negotiations via video chat in the civil sector. “We are simply not technically equipped for this yet,” says Kastlmeier. At the Freising District Court, according to the press spokesman, only his colleague Tanja Weihönig is currently working as an investigative judge with video technology. However, in such a way that it records witnesses interrogations on videos, which are then played back in negotiations.
In his assessment, it could well be that at some point in the Freising district court civil trials will also be conducted via video chat, says Kastlmeier. “In some cases that would make sense, because sometimes people come to make a statement that takes ten minutes, for example from Wuppertal.” If you switch to video negotiations, you could do without some long journeys. But it will take some time before it gets to that point in Freising. “At the moment there is nothing in the bush,” says the press spokesman.
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