Digitalization of legal proceedings as a way to ensure access to justice

Introduction: rapid spread of the coronavirus infection caused restrictions that have affected all areas of social relations. Russian legal proceedings have also changed significantly. The new context revealed problems in ensuring the work of the courts and administration of justice. The purpose of the article is to analyze the problems of the justice system during the pandemic, in particular, the inability to exercise the right to protection, lack of access to justice, violation of procedural deadlines, technical unpreparedness of courts for the implementation and use of information technologies in justice. Methods: general scientific methods (analysis and synthesis, induction and deduction, comparison and classification, abstraction and axiomatic method); statistical methods; special legal methods such as content analysis of legal acts and interpretation of laws. Results: we have analyzed legislation and compared Russian experience with the level of digitalization of judicial systems in foreign countries. The study indicates a low level of digital transformation of Russian legal proceedings and poor quality of the changes that have taken place. The realization of the right to judicial protection appears to be the most urgent problem. Conclusions: the pandemic showed unreadiness of the Russian judicial system for the rapid implementation of information technologies. However, it seems likely that in the short term, due to the information technology development, it will become possible in some cases to abandon the practice of face-to-face hearings on a wide range of cases.