-- JoseMariaDelajara - 23 Sep 2019

I am interested to know what the class thinks regarding legal analytics. Do the companies that provide that service should be treated with the same caution as we are now figuring out we must exercise towards Facebook? Are the citizens entitled to know the decision patterns from judges?

A little context might come in handy.Recently, France, a country typically related to freedom, passed a bill imposing up to 5 years in prison for the publication of statistical information about judges' decisions (e.g. judge analytics such as Context by Lexis Nexis).

• According to the French Justice Reform Act, judge analytics services won't be provided any time soon. Article 33 of the act states the following [translation]:“The identity data of the magistrates and the members of the judiciary m ay not be reused with the purpose or effect of evaluating, analyzing, comparing or predicting their actual or presumed professional practices.”

• Ironically, this ban is supposed to pursue a more predictable justice ("une justice plus prévisible"). The report specifically states that the ban regulated in article 33 resides upon "a regulation of the algorithms which exploit the data resulting from decisions, in order to ensure a transparency on the methodologies implemented". It also adds that "the profiling of judges and registry officials will also be prohibited so as not to undermine the proper functioning of justice".

• It seems as if the French Government is aiming to provide (at least part of) the services by themselves [translation]:"The ministry's decision-making information system will evolve to provide effective tools for analysis and management of the activity at the national and local levels. Users will have to be able to access on-line practical information, enriching what is already on the Justice.fr site (accessibility of jurisdictions, pedagogy of procedures, simulators ...), but also, for example, to indicators of procedural delay before the court they intend to refer to or to indicative scales or indicative benchmark"

In my view, judicial analytics organizes otherwise scrambled data. This allows justice users to receive better information about their actual winning probabilities instead of relying on attorneys' advice (tainted by optimism bias). What do you think?