Under a former chief justice, Allan MacEachern, B.C. was once seen as a leader in providing public access to the courts over the Internet.

Superior court rulings were made available on a modern website ahead of almost every other jurisdiction in North America.

This provided the public with much more access to information about the legal system.

Landlords, human-resources people, and even those going on a first date could run a name through the court's search engine and find out if a person had a checkered legal past. It also made things easier for legal practitioners.

But in recent years, the B.C. courts have not done as much as they could to keep up the transparency.

The Ministry of Justice's Court Services Online website seems more designed to raise money than to increase public access. That's because people have to pay sizeable fees to access every document that's filed in a criminal or civil case.

While there have been improvements to the Provincial Court of B.C. website's database of decisions, news releases mainly consist of announcing the retirement or the appointment of judges. There's no video on the site.

Here are three areas in which the B.C. Supreme Court and B.C. Court of Appeal website could be improved:

1. Add links to other judgments in rulings

The B.C. Court of Appeal deals with rulings from the B.C. Supreme Court. And the rulings always refer to the trial judge's findings. But these B.C. Court of Appeal judgments never include links.

This means anyone who uses the court website has to search the site for the previous ruling that's been appealed. It's time-consuming and unnecessary. If media websites were as bad as court websites in this regard, they would be out of business.

Nowadays, it's simple to add links to decisions. The courts should get on with doing this immediately.

2. Provide better biographies of the judges. 

The B.C. Supreme Court and B.C. Court of Appeal website only lists judges' dates of appointments and the dates they were called to the B.C. bar. That's not good enough in 2017. The public should be able to find out which firms they worked for, the judges' areas of specialty during their legal career, and whether they were professors or former Crown prosecutors.

The courts could take it one step further and link to all of individual judges' written rulings in the past. Either that, or set up a search function on the website so the public can look for decisions by each judge.

The court website should also put a high-resolution photo of the chief justices of the B.C. Court of Appeal and the B.C. Supreme Court on the website for use by the media.

That's to say nothing of adding a live question-and-answer session with the chief justices about how judges are assigned cases and to what degree the chief justices interact with the provincial government to obtain financial resources to run the courts.

In this so-called age of transparency, why not post a few videos on YouTube to help educate British Columbians about their court system?

3. Place more legal documents on the B.C. superior courts website.

A good start would be to add petitions for judicial review, as well as the responses to those petitions. For free. These documents are newsworthy because they often involve the actions of governments or regulatory bodies. The public has a right to know what's alleged before the decision is rendered.

If that went smoothly, then the courts could look at adding more documents, such as affidavits and notices of civil claim.

In closing, it's worth emphasizing that the courts belong to the people. They are not the exclusive preserve of the lawyers, judges, or governments.

Premier-designate John Horgan says he wants to make life more affordable for British Columbians. Giving them less expensive access to online legal information would be one more way he could fulfill this promise.