=Paper=
{{Paper
|id=Vol-2844/ethics3
|storemode=property
|title=The prospects of Artificial Intelligence in a Court Information System (short paper)
|pdfUrl=https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-2844/ethics3.pdf
|volume=Vol-2844
|authors=Epameinondas Troulinos
|dblpUrl=https://dblp.org/rec/conf/setn/Troulinos20
}}
==The prospects of Artificial Intelligence in a Court Information System (short paper)==
https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-2844/ethics3.pdf
The prospects of Artificial Intelligence in a Court Information
System
Epameinondas Troulinos
President of the Administrative Court of First Instance
Veria, Greece
etroulinos@adjustice.gr
ABSTRACT system one has to address the question of what use can AI have
for courts; that is how AI can help parties of a case (litigants),
Artificial Intelligence is a transformational force. The paper
members of the registry (court officers) and judges. We assume
examines this technology in an information system for the
that AI for the judiciary should be ‘bespoke’. It should provide
judiciary. It particularly explores how artificial intelligence could
solutions to the problems that a particular jurisdiction –using a
be used in the Integrated Administrative Court Case Management
certain court information system- faces. The aim of this paper is
System of Greece. We identify two broad categories for AI
to examine the effective application of AI regarding the court
development at the current level of this system: court-focused
information system that was introduced in 2015 at the
development and litigant-focused development. We examine
administrative justice of Greece, the Integrated Administrative
particular tools that could facilitate the adjudication of cases
Court Case Management System of Greece (IACCMS). Section 2
considering four types of users: judges, court officers, lawyers and
briefly introduces IACCMS and displays current and future
self-represented litigants. We conclude that certain tools could be
developments of the system, Section 3 presents potential AI
developed to offer assistance to the above mentioned users
solutions for IACCMS and our concluding remarks are on Section
4.
KEYWORDS
Administrative Justice, Court Information System, IACCMS, 2 Formation of the Integrated Administrative
Artificial Intelligence Court Case Management System of Greece
In this section we will introduce IACCMS, but firstly we will
provide some preliminary remarks about administrative justice in
1 Introduction Greece and the introduction of ICT in it. These observations are
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a technology, which will infiltrate necessary before assessing the possibilities of AI in the following
most aspects of our society. Although most people associate it section.
with machine learning, it is a much broader group of methods and The Constitution of 1975 (revised in 1986, 2001, 2008 and 2019)
approaches. The enthusiasm of solving every problem in justice establishes three jurisdictions: civil, criminal and administrative.
through technology fostered the introduction of Information and Administrative justice, i.e. a court system that adjudicates on
Communication Technologies (ICT) in the judiciary. Countries disputes between the citizen and the administration, is organized
introduced ICT in their justice systems in order to improve both in three tiers: the courts of first instance, the courts of appeal and
efficiency of justice and accessibility to justice. In this context, the Council of the State (the Supreme Administrative Court), the
policy makers examine how AI can be used in courts to facilitate latter being responsible for the rational operation of
both the administration of justice and the adjudication of cases. administrative justice. Furthermore, the General Commission of
Observing this trend the European Commission for the Efficiency the State for the Regular Administrative Courts, which is a
of Justice of the Council of Europe has already adopted a text separate branch of senior administrative judges, monitors and
setting out ethical principles relating to the use of AI in judicial oversights the operation of administrative courts and assists them
systems [1], which stands out among other similar European and without interfering with their judicial task. It is also the
international texts [2] in that it identifies core principles to be competent authority (at operational level) that serves as an
respected particularly in the field of AI and justice. Undoubtedly, intermediary between the Council of State and the rest of
the development of AI tools will transform the process of administrative courts. Finally, the Ministry of Justice,
adjudication, because they will alter the way legal information is Transparency and Human Rights is entrusted, among other
used and communicated. Hence, the effects of the changes competences, with the management of justice. It supervises the
introduced by AI have the potential of being much deeper and less administration of justice, dealing with organizational issues and
controllable. In examining the use of AI in a court information
WAIEL2020, September 3, 2020, Athens, Greece
Copyright © 2020 for this paper by its author. Use permitted under Creative
Commons License Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0).
the infrastructure and it provides economic (through the budget Bearing in mind the above-mentioned developments at
of the State) and administrative support to the judiciary. administrative justice in Greece, in the following section we will
After the re-establishment of administrative courts of first display the AI tools that could be used at IACCMS.
instance and appeal in their current form (in 1985) and the transfer
of cases from the Council of State to them, the number of cases
that they adjudicate rose exponentially and as a result there were 3 Development possibilities of AI for IACCMS
delays in delivering justice. The Greek legislator adopted several of Greece
laws in order to speed up court proceedings in administrative In recent years a lot of companies made investments to search the
justice. In addition, the introduction of ICT in administrative potential of AI, with considerable results (e.g. IBM’s Watson and
justice turned into a priority. From 2000 onwards the Council of Google’s Alpha Go). AI innovations provide services to end users
State started the computerization of its registrar for the workflow (e.g. Apple’s Siri and Amazon’s Alexa voice assistants, user-
of judicial proceedings before the court (case management) and specific content provided by Netflix etc.), though the fact that
also the integration of existing applications. In 2006 the integrated these services are based on the collection and processing of user
case management system of the Council of State was operational; generated data, is raising concerns about the protection of
it contained the court’s jurisprudence, the workflows of the personal data [4] and generally about privacy in the digital age
registrar (computerization of proceedings), a management [5]. However, it was the availability of massive amounts of
information system (MIS) and a web site. On the other hand, the training data, along with breakthroughs in computational power,
computerization of administrative courts of first instance and improvements in machine learning algorithms and mobile
appeal was fragmented, since each court was perceived (from an connectivity that fostered AI breakthroughs. The use of AI
IT point of view) as an autonomous entity; that is each court was technology for managing public services has the potential to make
responsible both for the administration of its data and for the public organizations more adaptive to a society with diverse and
communication with external users, including other changing needs and demands. AI will continue to transform
administrative courts. The different information systems that the society, although there is skepticism about AI’s potential, due to
courts had did not interoperate with information systems outside the fact that many of the grand claims made (e.g. autonomous
of the judiciary (e.g. lawyers, public administration, citizens), thus vehicles) have failed to become reality. The limits to the use of AI
hindering the efficiency of justice. Furthermore, due to local are mainly due to the fact that the most widespread technique,
configuration of systems there was local implementation of work machine learning, is a powerful patent recognition tool, but lacks
flows, thus a need for an integrated electronic case management fundamental cognitive abilities of the human brain. It is accurately
system became evident. There were few digital archives and court argued that “AI represents a concerted effort to understand the
decisions were available only to the court that issued them, with complexity of human experience in terms of information
the exception of judgements of Council of State. Furthermore, the processes” [6]. Many stakeholders (litigants, lawyers, court
lack of funds due to the drastic reduction in budgetary resources officers and judges) anticipate the introduction and development
made untenable the maintenance cost of infrastructure. of AI into the justice system, though each group expects different
Beware of those issues the Ministry of Justice, Transparency and results, which do not always converge. We identify two broad
Human Rights in its ‘Action Plan for e-justice and administrative categories: a) court-focused development of AI, i.e. tools that help
improvement’ [3, in Greek] decided that the Council of State the justice system to improve its efficiency and quality and b)
would lead the initiative to introduce IACCMS, which is litigant-focused development of A.I., i.e. tools that help either self-
operational since 2015. For the purposes of this paper, we are represented litigants or lawyers to navigate legal processes; i.e. to
interested in three of the main components of IACCMS: i) the gather information about how the law applies to a particular case.
court case management system, which coordinates the workflows In the first category (court-focused development of AI), these
(business process) of all the courts of administrative justice, ii) the techniques could be used for court management purposes. For
uniform digital archive of all court decisions, accessible to all example, an AI tool could scan and digitize documents submitted
judges and partially accessible (only of anonymized judgements) by litigants, classify them into electronic files and match the
to the general public and iii) a ‘one-stop-shop’ portal through document of each litigant to corresponding e-files (creating new
which external users can gather information from any court. Since e-files or linking to existing ones). It could further generate all
2018 IACCMS interoperates with the National Lawyers necessary court procedural documents and even distribute cases
Information System for the e-filing of cases (application to initiate to judges. IACCMS already has a court case management system
proceedings). In addition, this year (2020) IACCMS interoperates that generates some court procedural documents (namely, notices
with the information system of the Legal Council of the State (the and dockets). Since it is not yet mandatory to file a lawsuit by
public body that defends the Administration before all courts) for electronic means, the workflow is still paper based, meaning that
the e-filing of a case, the electronic delivery of court decisions and regardless of the way a lawsuit is filed (paper or electronic form)
for clearance of legal costs. Finally, articles 75 and 76 of law the court officer has to enter the data to the information system.
4635/2019 stipulate that the communication between litigants and Law 4635/2019 stipulates that from 01.01.2021 the medium to
administrative courts from 01.01.2021 will be by electronic means; communicate with administrative courts will be electronic; AI
the law further establishes the electronic file of each case could be useful in automating the process of data entry. A
(‘paperless court’). prerequisite is to create ontology of legal terms -a ‘Controlled
Legal Vocabulary’- that will provide the relevant metadata for the judgments of the Council of State already use ECLI, and its
legal annotation of each document perhaps using LegalDocML obligatory metadata. The potential is to use ECLI to all court
(Akoma Ntoso); it would be beneficial to create an automatic decisions of administrative justice and furthermore use at least
structuring and semantic indexing of legal documents written in two of the optional metadata of this tool. Particularly, the field
Greek [7]. The AI tool should process uniformly all unstructured “dcterms: abstract” contains a summary of the court decision and
documents that are uploaded to IACCMS; it should further the field “dcterms: description” contains descriptive elements, like
automatically apply metadata and connect the document to a keywords. Both of these fields could be filled using the technique
particular electronic case [8]. For this purpose and to further of legal text analytics, which was previously described, i.e. an AI
enhance interoperability, some of the existing tools that EU tool that is able to ‘read’ the relevant parts of a court decision and
provides to its member states could be used such as Controlled on the one hand create a summary of the judgement and on the
Vocabularies , LegiVoc , Vocbench and, for the documents that other hand apply the appropriate terms of the ‘Controlled Legal
public administration sends, LEOS . Since it is very challenging to Vocabulary’. It would further be desirable to create an AI tool
process a legal document not developed by a lawyer, it would be capable of anonymizing or pseudonymizing a court decision
helpful to consider the development of techniques that will help before uploading it at the portal of IACCMS, where it would be
self-represented litigants to present facts in a more structured accessible for everyone to access. This tool should be able to
way, recognize natural persons and anonymize or pseudonymize their
Having established an AI system such as the one already personal data, while preserving the accuracy of the court decision.
described, it could be further used to improve the quantitative Regarding the second category (litigant-focused development of
processing of e-files. For example, an AI tool could identify certain A.I.), AI could be used to provide relevant information to external
legal features (information extraction) in each case, assign it to users of IACCMS. For example, using a question answering
different case management tracks according to its complexity and system [12], citizens, self-represented litigants as well as lawyers
also group cases. Thus, it could streamline the processing of could gather information about the jurisprudence of a particular
judicial procedures in adjudicating a case, while also reducing category of cases (landmark decisions). Usually, prospective
court staff and judges’ workload. This system could also provide litigants prior to filing a claim to initiate legal proceedings need
useful information to citizens (apart from prospective litigants information such as the extent of their rights, court costs, length
and lawyers), such as the duration of judicial proceedings for of proceedings, the necessary procedural steps to be followed etc.
different categories of cases in a particular court, the number of European judicial bodies of the Council of Europe encourage the
pending cases of a particular nature etc. Moreover, machine dissemination of information to citizens by courts in order to
learning could be applied to the analysis of legal documents so as facilitate access to justice [13 and 14]. The EU is consolidating
to support judges in the solving of a dispute. For example, it could relevant information about member states in the European e-
create summaries of both the facts of the case and the arguments justice portal . In order to provide personalized information to
that each litigant made in the documents (lawsuit, submissions, self-represented litigants and lawyers the development of an
and memorandums) [9]. However, before rolling out such an AI interactive information system that maintains dynamic
tool thorough assessing should be preceded, because AI cannot information (a difficult task, since courts are subject to almost
(yet) understand the context of a document; in other words, it continuous change of the law) at the portal of IACCMS is
cannot perform legal reasoning and therefore AI could be misled necessary. In a simplified form such a system could assist the
by minor variances in the data that it applies [10]. We prospective self-represented litigant or the lawyer through a
comprehend that although existing legal text analytics tools can dynamic questionnaire (dialogue modelling). Moreover, a
extract certain kinds of semantic legal information from legal conversational bot (Chabot) could be developed to enable users to
texts, they are not yet able to extract expert systems rules. It is interface with it by voice and language, as long as it is able to
therefore necessary to further develop techniques that identify analyze structured and unstructured data (text and human
argument related information in legal documents. speech). The advantage of the development of such an AI tool is
Additionally, AI tools could be used for the further development that it can improve its efficiency by learning from the recorded
of the uniform digital archive of all court decisions in IACCMS. dialogues, thus each time finding a more suitable answer to the
This database is accessible only to judges of administrative justice question posed. Obviously, sufficient safeguards are needed for
and it contains all the judgements of the Council of State and the the protection of personal data of the users in the recorded
judgements of all administrative courts of first instance and dialogues. The goal is to navigate the user to the ‘customized’
appeal since 2015 and for some courts since 2000. It could be useful information that he seeks and only in rare cases direct the user to
to develop an AI tool for the retrieval of decisions related to a a court officer who will provide the necessary information. To this
particular case. In order to succeed in this endeavor an imperative end the system should be simple enough for a user with basic
condition is the unambiguous identification of each court technological literacy to use; a complex system may delay the
decision; i.e. to ‘label’ or ‘tag’ each judgment with the appropriate expected advantages especially for self-represented litigants,
metadata (in a project similar to the one mentioned earlier about hence the testing phase with stakeholders is important. There is
legal documents). In the case of court decisions there is already in currently significant attention on developing tools to assist people
place a useful tool provided by EU, the European Case Law in resolving legal disputes [15], however, an AI tool to predict the
Identifier (ECLI) [11] that could be defined as HTTP-URI. The outcome of court cases or even to analyze the quality of a legal
claim and evidence to be submitted would be out of the scope of text, document, and corpus analytics (LTDCA-2016), pp 30–36. Retrieved June
17, 2020 from http://law-and-big-data.org/LTDCA_2016_Workshop_Report.pdf
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Besides, such AI tools, at the current stage of development, can selected sentence rewriting. In Proceedings of the 56th Annual Meeting of the
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