From Europe's recovery fund to America's pandemic aid, temporary funding built faster courts and stronger local services. Hybrid institutions can make the change permanent.
Ninety-four new hires expected. Five arrived. Those two numbers sum up the crisis at a major court in one of Europe's most expensive cities. On 6 October its president called a press conference to warn that staff shortages were putting essential services at risk. For some roles, such as court clerks, up to 60% of posts are vacant.
The problem is not a lack of recruitment. It is the cost of living. On a salary of around €1,600 a month, many successful candidates simply decline to relocate. The court is asking for affordable housing, regional recruitment and official "hardship post" status for the city.
These measures take time. Alongside them, hybrid collaboration can make a complementary contribution: making the work of justice less dependent on where people live. This one court helps explain why the issue deserves attention far beyond its city walls.
A global cliff edge
The court's story is not unique, and its timing is no accident. Around the world, governments are closing the books on the money they spent to recover from the pandemic. The EU's NextGenerationEU recovery fund is closing: the deadline for countries to complete their reforms and investments passed on 31 August, and the last payments are due by 31 December 2026. In the United States, the $350 billion Congress gave state, local, tribal and territorial governments under the American Rescue Plan must be spent by the end of 2026, and analysts have warned that some states face a fiscal cliff as the programmes it paid for lose their funding.
The court above shows what is at stake. Its country used European recovery funds to achieve a historic result: between 2019 and mid-2026, the average length of civil proceedings was cut by half, from almost seven years to under three and a half. Faster justice weighs on a country's credit rating and on the confidence of anyone thinking of investing there.
Yet that result rests largely on temporary staff and extraordinary resources. If courts in big cities cannot keep the people who pass their recruitment exams, delays will grow again as soon as the emergency money runs out.
Many justice systems never got that far. India's courts hold more than 50 million pending cases, according to government figures presented to parliament this year. Brazil's judiciary ended 2025 with 75.5 million cases in progress. In England and Wales, the Crown Court backlog reached nearly 81,000 cases in mid-2026, the highest on record. Worldwide, the World Justice Project has estimated that around 5 billion people have justice needs that go unmet.
Fast justice is as much a driver of competitiveness as roads, ports and power lines. It makes the legal environment more efficient and more attractive for citizens, businesses and investors. The question is how to make it last without tying it to the property market of a single city.
Beyond the courts: keeping what recovery funds built
The issue goes well beyond justice. In the same European country, the parliamentary budget office found in June 2026 that recovery funding sped up public procurement, especially in small and medium-sized municipalities, but that the bodies that benefited most were those already experienced in managing EU funds. The plan's lasting value, it noted, will depend on turning those practices into permanent improvements in ordinary administration. The association representing mountain municipalities named the shortage of technical and administrative staff in small local authorities as their number one problem.
It is a pattern every continent will recognise, from mountain villages in Europe to rural counties in America: the money arrives faster than the capacity to use it.
Hybrid working can make a concrete difference. Municipalities that joined forces, through shared procurement offices or jointly run services, performed better because they pooled people and skills. A team of engineers and experts can support many small authorities remotely, like a shared technical office, without anyone having to travel every day. In the same way, people who gained experience running recovery-funded projects can support smaller authorities from another location.
Then there are the facilities that were built. Nurseries, schools and community health centres need staff to function. In a community health centre in a remote village, a consultation with a specialist connected from the city hospital can offer what would otherwise not be available. Hybrid technical working groups and help desks can speed up the dialogue between small municipalities and national ministries, which local officials often describe as painfully slow.
As the next cycles of public investment are designed, including the EU's 2028–2034 budget, strengthening the administrative capacity of the smallest territories is one of the best ways to stop the same gaps from reappearing.
What it could mean for a big court
The court in our example helps show, in practical terms, what hybrid working can offer. Not a recipe to impose, but a set of options that court leaders could consider, always within the rules of procedure.
The first is support from other locations: staff and judges from less overstretched courts could take on some of the work remotely. The second is hybrid hearings, with parties, lawyers, witnesses and interpreters connected from wherever they are: less logistical burden for court registries, and fewer adjournments.
The third is more flexible organisation, allowing people who live in another city to carry out some of their work at a distance. People who today turn down a post because of the cost of living could accept it without having to move.
Hybrid working does not replace the courthouse, nor the measures the court is calling for. But it can loosen the link between an institution's capacity and the rents in its city, and indirectly ease the housing pressure on those who work for the state.
The foundations are already in place
Nor would any of this start from scratch. In the European country above, a 2022 justice reform allows civil judges to hold hearings by audiovisual link when only lawyers, parties, prosecutors and court auxiliaries need to take part, rather than witnesses. Any party may ask to appear in court, and the judge can order a mixed hearing: in person for those who request it, remote for everyone else. It is, in effect, a hybrid hearing already recognised by law. The same reform introduced dedicated rules for remote participation in criminal proceedings.
At EU level, Regulation 2023/2844 has governed hearings by videoconference in cross-border civil and commercial cases, and in some criminal procedures, since May 2025. EU law already requires public bodies' websites and apps to be accessible, and since 28 June 2025 the European Accessibility Act has extended similar obligations to many private services. During the pandemic, local councils in many countries were authorised to meet by videoconference, and many have since adopted their own rules for remote sittings.
The legal tools, in other words, already exist in many places. The question is how to make the most of them, with technology that matches the rules public institutions are bound to respect.
The doubts, and the answers
The concerns are real and deserve to be heard. Some lawyers and judges fear that remote links weaken the oral nature of proceedings and direct contact with the judge, especially when a witness is being heard. Others point to the risk of excluding people without a good connection or with little familiarity with technology. The numbers back them up: according to the International Telecommunication Union, 2.2 billion people are still offline, and only 58% of rural residents use the internet, against 85% in cities. And there is confidentiality: a remote hearing must be as protected as a courtroom.
These are legitimate concerns, but today they have answers. There are platforms designed specifically for hearings and institutional meetings, very different from ordinary video calls. They can identify participants with certainty and manage the order of speakers as in a courtroom. They provide audio and video quality good enough to assess a witness's reactions and, where necessary, protect a witness's identity by masking their face and surroundings. They produce a legally valid record and store data securely within the relevant jurisdiction.
They are also built for the most vulnerable. They offer real-time captions, interpretation in many languages and in sign language, and they work with the assistive tools used by people with visual, hearing or motor impairments. They run on any device, with nothing to install, and keep participants connected even on weak networks, as is often the case in rural and remote areas. With these tools, those who join remotely take part with the same guarantees as those in the room.
One principle remains: hybrid is an additional option, not an obligation, and it is for the judge and the parties to decide when to use it. But technology is no longer the obstacle.
What other countries are doing
In many countries hybrid is now established practice, often governed by specific legislation.
In the United States, the Americans with Disabilities Act now sets precise digital-accessibility requirements for public bodies, based on the WCAG guidelines, with deadlines in 2027 and 2028. In California, SB 707, signed in October 2025, rewrote the rules on public meetings of local bodies with a clear goal: making citizen participation more open and accessible. Since 1 July 2026, many cities, counties and local agencies must allow the public to follow meetings and speak remotely, by audio and video or by phone, with live captions. They must also translate agendas into other languages and actively involve community organisations and the media. It is the broadest reform of its kind in decades, and it is likely to set a precedent.
In Saudi Arabia, hybrid hearings are already practised at scale. Between 1 September 2025 and 31 August 2026, the Board of Grievances, the court that handles administrative cases and disputes between citizens and the state, dealt with 463,029 cases involving 776,503 people and more than 10,000 hybrid sessions: an average of about 8,900 cases a week.
It is not an isolated case. In the United Arab Emirates, the Abu Dhabi Judicial Department held more than 317,000 remote hearings and handled around 447,000 requests electronically in the first half of 2026 alone, and Qatar has also invested in remote hearings and judicial services. In Australia, New South Wales allows councils to let councillors attend meetings remotely. In northern Europe, countries such as Estonia and Finland have made digital public institutions a hallmark of their model of government.
Europe is moving too. With the Accessibility Act in force and a common framework for videoconferencing in cross-border cases, there are already several reference points to build on.
Not just courts: where hybrid changes citizens' lives
The benefits seen abroad can extend to many areas, each with a well-known need and a large public.
In civil and criminal justice, hybrid can help clear backlogs, reduce adjournments and prisoner transfers, and allow courts to support one another. Arbitration and mediation can become faster and cheaper while preserving guarantees of impartiality. In asylum procedures and immigration detention centres, interpreters connected remotely can prevent interviews from being postponed for lack of translators.
Local government would benefit as well. Municipal councils could hold valid hybrid sittings, with certified votes and quorums, and citizens able to follow proceedings from home. In rural areas, a video help desk with an interpreter, in a post office or a library, can bring public administration closer to people who live far from regional capitals.
The world's 304 million international migrants could hold consular interviews and complete paperwork without travelling hundreds of kilometres. Public bodies and state-owned companies could convene boards and committees with verifiable votes and minutes. And civil protection agencies could keep emergency committees running through the summer, in the season of wildfires and extreme weather.
Prisons are perhaps the most telling case. Overcrowding and a shortage of guards make every transfer to court a cost and a risk. A secure, traceable and humane remote hearing protects both security and the dignity of the person.
Finally, there is democratic participation in small communities. In a small mountain town, a councillor who works in the city or a parent who cannot leave their children can still take part in a valid meeting. The quorum stops depending on the state of the road.
Safeguards for citizens
A hearing, a council vote, a prison interview: all involve highly sensitive information, from people's identities and testimony to decisions with legal effect. Those who take part remotely are entitled to the same protections as those in the room.
One of them is knowing where their data ends up. Many widely used video tools are run by companies whose servers sit outside the jurisdiction of the institutions relying on them, subject to other countries' laws. For a business that may be an acceptable risk; for a court or a city council, much less so. European governments made the point in November 2025, when they signed a Declaration for European Digital Sovereignty stating that public data must remain under European jurisdiction and authority. It is a principle any country could apply to its own institutions.
Hybrid does not simply mean "video call". It means that those in the room and those connected remotely take part in the same session with the same rights, and that every step has formal value. Conventional video-conferencing tools, designed for business meetings, are not built for this: they do not guarantee reliable identification of participants, orderly management of speaking turns, secret or open ballots, quorum calculation, a legally valid record, interpretation or sign language. When any of these is missing, a sitting can be challenged and a decision annulled.
In recent years, digital identity and online public services, from Estonia's e-ID to India's Aadhaar, have brought the state closer to its citizens. The next step concerns how institutions themselves meet, deliberate and hold hearings. These choices deserve care, because the tools adopted today will shape public life for many years.
A building block of the 2030 Agenda
Hybrid institutions speak directly to several of the UN's Sustainable Development Goals. The most obvious is Goal 16, which calls for effective, accountable and inclusive institutions and access to justice for all. Goal 10, on reducing inequalities, matters too: bringing courts and public offices closer to people in remote areas, to people with disabilities and to those who do not speak the local language means reducing distances that today weigh hardest on the most vulnerable. According to the World Health Organization, 1.3 billion people, one in six of us, live with a significant disability.
Goals 11 and 13, on sustainable cities and climate action, are just as relevant, and the energy shock has made them urgent. With the Strait of Hormuz largely closed since early March, and Europe still bearing the energy costs of Russia's war on Ukraine, the first of the International Energy Agency's emergency recommendations to governments, businesses and households was blunt: work from home where possible. Fewer compulsory journeys ease housing pressure on big cities, support small communities and cut emissions. Every hearing held without transferring a detainee, every council meeting held without dozens of kilometres by car, is energy saved.
An institution is only open if everyone can reach it
Since the pandemic, courts, councils and public offices around the world have learned to work at a distance, often with whatever tools were at hand. That period proved it could be done. Now the task is to do it well: with technology that respects the rules of public institutions, protects citizens' data within the right jurisdiction, and gives every decision taken remotely the same value as one taken in the room.
Think of the wheelchair user facing the steps of a council chamber. The elderly villager hours away from the nearest court. The asylum seeker who does not understand the language of the interview that will decide their future. The deaf citizen entitled to follow every word of a trial that concerns them.
For each of them, distance, language or disability must not become a barrier. Democracy is not only the right to vote: it is the ability to see your institutions at work and to reach them when you need them.
In a mountain village, a quorum should not depend on the state of the road. In a big city, justice should not depend on the rent.
At Cives, we believe public institutions must stay open, fair and within reach of every citizen. Cives, Latin for “citizens”, is the AI-powered platform for institutional hybrid collaboration, purpose-built for governments, courts, parliaments and regulated enterprises, and already trusted on four continents. Our name is not a coincidence. It is a commitment.