Back in 1995 I [briefly] worked for a legal publisher in the UK. The Lord Chancellors Department (now defunct) wanted to provide court listings on the Internet. They used UUCP to transfer court listings to each court over POTS, so that the judges would know what cases they were hearing that week. We became a recipient of those listings which were sent as plain text files with lots of white-space formatting. The text was then placed in pre tags in HTML pages, one for each court for each day: so the information was discoverable on the web. That was a long time ago, and I don't think it covered magistrates courts; but surely the services could have progressed a bit since then?