The COVID-19 pandemic has presented my judicial colleagues with many challenges to our mutual mission to ensure that our courts provide meaningful access to justice for all litigants throughout the state. For much of the past two years, we've strived mightily to adapt to remote technology to continue the business of the courts. But true access to justice often requires face-to-face, in-person proceedings—where litigants and their counsel feel that they have been heard and treated as real, not virtual, people, encountering real, not virtual, problems. And it heartens me that we have been able to move slowly but surely to more in-person activities in the courthouse, as well as at bar association functions and social occasions with colleagues. To be sure, we need to take care to be as safe as we can while we increase in-person proceedings and activities, but it is imperative that we do so if we are to really hear and understand each other as we work toward resolution of issues of disagreement.

During the past two years, my judicial colleagues have employed innovative technologies that have, inarguably, furthered our mutual mission of ensuring access to justice for all. With the assistance of court administrators, dedicated clerks, technical personnel, and other court staff, we have held countless virtual case management conferences, motion arguments, evidentiary hearings, and even full bench trials to help bring legal disputes to resolution. To help litigants participate remotely in proceedings so important to them, we have established kiosks in the courthouses, and worked with community partners to establish many others at libraries and churches. Our appellate courts have similarly adapted to hear oral arguments remotely. And in both trial and appellate courts, we have begun streaming proceedings in real time to ensure the public's constitutional right of access to observe our courts at work.