Digitally Produced Judgements in Modern Court Proceedings

Abstract

This paper shows an improvement of legal decision-making via digitally produced verdicts. We investigate the use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in relation to rendering arbitrational verdicts. The data was provided by e-Court, the first private online court of the Netherlands. In our survey the standard debt collection proceedings under Dutch Civil and Procedural law are used as a case study. The introduction of the subject matter is followed by an overview of the key-parameters required by e-Court for rendering a verdict in default cases. The reasoning methodologies of Intelligent Systems in the legal domain are then discussed. Following this discussion, we will analyze the nature of the e-Court System to understand how it benefits from the various types of Intelligent Systems. Subsequently, we will discuss the rationale behind the choices made, the legal implications and the handling process within the public courts. We review in brief some expectations about the further developments and compare them with the current best practices at the Dutch e-Court. Our contribution lies also in the investigation of the characteristics of the e-Court system for rendering default verdicts in debt collection proceedings. In our conclusion we will consider to what extent intelligent systems will be used in the contemporary digital court houses.