How can improving the collection, sharing, and analysis of data make the civil justice system more accountable to other government institutions, participants in the justice system, and the public at large? We tackle this question from three angles. First we show how accountability can create opportunities for civil justice reform. Drawing on work in other social spheres on large datasets, we identify three lines of research that court data could inform: the extent that structural racism and other biases shape processes and outcomes; the impact of lack of representation on litigants’ experiences and outcomes; and the antecedents and consequences of court involvement for poor people. A second focus is the obstacles that prevent us from increasing our store of knowledge about civil justice problems. These obstacles include: the lack of good data, legal barriers to obtaining data, and real and perceived institutional risks to sharing data. Finally, we report on our efforts to design and build a civil justice data commons (CJDC) addressing these barriers in order to provide fast and frictionless access for policy research as well as operational insights for courts and civil justice institutions to improve equity and service delivery.

As we have seen so far in this book, the IoT comprises various connected devices, services, and systems. Connecting regular devices to the Internet has made it much easier for companies to protect their interests in consumer transactions. New technologies allow companies to continue to wield significant control over us and our devices beyond the point of sale, license, or lease. As Aaron Perzanowski and Jason Schultz have observed, the IoT “threatens our sense of control over the devices we purchase.”1 Of chief concern is companies’ use of technology to control our devices and actions and digitally restrain our activities in lending transactions.

We now live in a world where we can obtain current information about a global pandemic from our smartphones and Internet of Things (IoT) devices.1 The recent novel coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak is not just a public health emergency. The pandemic has forced us to further evaluate the extent to which privacy should give way to public health threats and resulting technological innovations.2 It directly raises questions about whether legal frameworks governing our privacy should be relaxed to address public health concerns, and if any such relaxation will continue post pandemic to permanently undermine our privacy.3

As we have seen, the law wields considerable influence over the rights and remedies available to us as consumers. Several areas of commercial law are ill-equipped to sufficiently protect our consumer interests in the IoT age. This is because various legal frameworks governing commercial practices have not been sufficiently reformulated to account for the growing connections between the world of privacy and the world of commercial law. As earlier sections of this book have demonstrated, there are multiple legal frameworks impacting commercial practices at the federal and state level that are ripe for significant legal reform. These sources of law include contract law, the FAA, products liability law, the CDA, debt collection law, the Bankruptcy Code, and secured financing laws.

This book chapter compares civil litigation in the courts of first and second instances in Taiwan in 2010–2015 with that in U.S. federal courts in 2010–2013. The two judicial systems, as expected, are different in many ways. Settlement rates in Taiwan, even broadly defined, were below 25%; in U.S. federal court, they exceed 70%. In Taiwan, summary judgments were basically non-existent; in U.S. federal court, they represent nearly a third of merits judgments. Rates of appeal in Taiwan are nearly 10 times higher (27% versus 3%) than in the U.S. federal courts. And yet judges in Taiwan, at least those in the court of first instance, handled cases more quickly than their colleagues in the U.S. federal courts—indeed, twice as fast. Yet, the two judicial systems respond similarly when encountering simple debt collection cases. These cases, large in number in both systems, fail to settle as standard theories would predict. Instead, these disputes are frequently resolved through default judgments. This chapter provides cautionary lessons for future empirical comparative civil procedure studies.