Scotland will stop pinning civil court notices to courthouse walls and start publishing them on the Scottish Courts and Tribunals Service (SCTS) website from 1 December 2025. The change is set out in an Act of Sederunt made on 29 October and laid before the Scottish Parliament on 30 October, marking a tidy but significant update to centuries of practice.

For readers across the North who deal with cross‑border work, this is practical news. From Berwick to Carlisle, firms handling Scottish debt recovery, insolvency and family matters will be able to check required notices online rather than chasing paper pinned in court foyers hours up the A1.

In plain terms, when a person’s address is unknown or the rules require wider notice, the duty to display information at a court building can now be met by putting key details on the SCTS website. That means the type of action and the names and addresses of the parties are made publicly available so the legal requirement to notify is satisfied without a physical posting.

The scope is broad. The Court of Session has applied the change to Acts of Sederunt generally and to the Ordinary Cause Rules 1993. Two important carve‑outs remain: it does not apply to Simple Procedure and it does not apply to the Sheriff Appeal Court Rules, so the day‑to‑day small‑claims style cases keep their existing arrangements for now.

Petitions get clearer signposting too. For Court of Session petitions, online publication will show the petitioner’s name, what the petition is for and who is acting as solicitor. For commissary petitions relating to an estate, the notice will include the petitioner’s name, the purpose of the petition and the name and address of the deceased.

Operational notices that used to sit on a board in court can also go online. This includes lists for certain holiday‑period motions and notices of a trial’s date and place in statutory applications. In short, the things practitioners once checked on a wall can be checked on a browser.

This shift has been trailed for a while. The Scottish Civil Justice Council consulted on replacing the traditional “walls of court” with “online intimation”, publishing a consultation paper along with impact assessments, and extended the response deadline to April 2025. The consultation materials signal the move is about modernising access while weighing privacy and equality impacts.

The SCTS has also been upgrading the digital plumbing this year, from launching Court of Session case tracking in February to larger uploads and wider civil tracking announced in September. That backdrop makes today’s rule change feel less radical and more like the next step in a live programme of work.

For Northern firms and advisers, the immediate to‑do list is simple: from 1 December, check the SCTS website rather than courthouse boards, update precedent letters to reflect online publication, and brief clients that names and addresses may appear on a public webpage when rules require wider notice.

Formally, the instrument is signed in Edinburgh by the Lord President, Paul Cullen (Lord Pentland). He became head of Scotland’s judiciary on 3 February 2025, and now presides over a system that is steadily moving routine civil business online.