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The Centre de Telecomunicacions i Tecnologies de la Informació (CTTI) is the public body that integrates all the information technologies and telecommunications services of the Government of Catalonia. It is responsible for designing, building, coordinating, and deploying technological projects to provide solutions to all departments and various bodies of the Public Administration, being in charge of managing and evolving all the IT services of the Ministry of Justice of the Government of Catalonia according to their needs and demands.
The Secretariat for Justice Administration of the Ministry of Justice of the Government of Catalonia includes among its functions the modernization of the justice administration in Catalonia through the renovation of judicial infrastructures, information systems, and the organization of the judicial office to achieve a more open, agile, efficient and quality justice.
The time dedicated by judges to search for precedents and legal foundations to write a sentence is high and an impediment to being more agile in the drafting of sentences, causing a high response time and a sense of slow justice.
Currently, the location of paragraphs of interest of legal or procedural references, of any documentary information or the entirety of the magistrates’ own judgments or resolutions previously issued, which may be applicable or reusable in the drafting of new judgments or resolutions, becomes a manual and costly process that causes magistrates to spend a lot of time locating, remembering, and reviewing previous judgments, relying on their memory, both for their content and the date they were issued.
In Catalonia, the judge usually performs a manual search in the procedural management application for justice (eJusticia.cat), in the archive of the magistrate’s own judgments, or through the Judicial Documentation Center (CENDOJ), depending on the General Council of the Judiciary (CGPJ), as well as other repositories or jurisprudential databases. The search is more or less effective depending on what the magistrate remembers at that time from similar cases or parts of an old judgment that may be applicable to the current one.
The Challenge is to reduce the time dedicated in redacting sentences by locating reusable information within judicial documents, such as sentences issued in any instance and jurisdiction, in order to speed up and facilitate the drafting of new sentences by judges.
Currently, the location of paragraphs of interest (headings, legal foundations, dispositive part or judgment), legal or procedural references or the entirety of the judges’ previous sentences, that are applicable or reusable in the drafting of new sentences, becomes a manual and costly process that causes judges to spend a lot of time locating, remembering and reviewing previous judgments, based on memory, both of their content and of the date they were issued.
The solution we want to obtain is an assistant to judges and magistrates that, by entering an open text or prompt, can quickly, accurately, and relatedly obtain all applicable historical information for the sentence being drafted. In the same way, the assistant must provide the applicable legal foundations and sentence draft for a better management of mass litigation cases with hundreds of very similar claims that has also similar resolutions.
This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon Europe research and innovation programme under the Grant Agreement 101071212.
Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or European Innovation Council and SMEs Executive Agency (EISMEA). Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them.
