If I was to say that I had been fascinated by watching a number of distinguished lawyers making submissions on constitutional law to judges in the highest court in the UK, I would probably not be alone. The number of people tuning in to watch the live streaming of Gina Miller’s case has sent the number of hits to the Supreme Court live website from the thousands to the millions. Many will say that this is a good thing. It makes the administration of justice more transparent and opens the process of the law up to scrutiny, perhaps casting off some myths in the process. Those are not sentiments that I would disagree with.

It may also help to exert pressure for change. There were precious few women in the court and people from a black and ethnic minority background were largely absent. In a society as diverse as the UK, this appeared to be anachronistic at best.

There are also risks in the way that the media consistently deals with subjects. It tends to over-simplify and concentrates on personalities rather than focusing on the details and the arguments. This sits uneasily with the law, which generally does, and should, focus on the details and the arguments. The acres of news coverage that chose to look at the barristers themselves rather than their arguments were matched only by the focus on soundbite interventions from the justices and the replies to those.

Owing to the demand for readers and viewers, together with an assumption that people have a short attention span, the collective public memory tends to be very short. For example, it was only a few months ago that the Government was talking about not only preserving employment rights under Brexit, but enhancing them. While that was never specified, it was a phrase often repeated. One would spend a long, and probably fruitless, time now trying to find any reference to protecting and enhancing employment law in the reporting of the current debate concerning Brexit.

Most of us deal with employment tribunal claims and we know that many of them contain newsworthy stories. What people get up to at work, where we spend most of our waking time, is endlessly fascinating and employment disputes can provide fuel to that. Many of us will have dealt with cases where there has been media interest and will have raised an eyebrow at the way in which evidence has been reported or left out altogether.

While there is no specific proposal to open up tribunal hearings to be streamed live to the phones, tablets and TVs of the UK, given the development of technology and its effect on reporting (the use of Twitter in tribunals and courts is a good example), it will not be long before there is pressure to open up all courts – including employment tribunals – to broadcast technology. Although the arguments to do so are ones that have merit and are in many ways compelling, I think that great caution needs to be exercised before doing so. Transparency has much to recommend itself and education is not something to be criticised. The issue is whether a media that is commercial and aims to grab and hold viewers’ attention is able to respect those two ideals.

Alex Lock, DAC Beachcroft LLP