e-dossier at the Dutch Council of State: design, implementation and lessons learned

Traditionally researchers in the AI&Law community conduct research after legal reasoning, legal knowledge representation and the application of AI-based techniques for supporting legal practitioners or their clients. The focus in AI&Law research, after focusing on legal knowledge based systems has shifted to legal argumentation, which as a topic is very appealing both from a knowledge representation perspective (especially if you have a background in logics) as from a knowledge engineering perspective. However while many researchers working in the field of AI&Law focus on legal argumentation only a few actually build argumentation support systems. Even fewer researchers actually conduct empirical research aimed at supporting lawyers and judges in practical situations. This is a pity since empirical research is a requisite for building systems that are to support lawyers and judges in their daily practice. Furthermore interesting developments are going on in different legal institutions, developments that bring the application of scientific results much closer. The current situation is that only a very small number of argumentation support systems exist, e.g. Auraucaria by Reed and Rowe [1] and Argumed by Verheij [2] and even these systems are not useable in practice. For AI & Law researchers it may be disappointing to experience that the systems that are actually used and considered to be useful are much less advanced compared to the dream ware in the researchers minds. The progress made in legal content management solutions is huge. Key to the success in this field is cooperation in the field of standardization, e.g. in the CEN/Metalex working group focusing on standards for legal sources. In the SEAL project [3] that was sponsored under the European eParticipation programme three different editors for legislation drafting were tested and a first attempt to come up with an open, integrated infrastructure for supporting the legislative chain has been made. Similar approaches have been developed in the judicial domain. Recent studies such as [4], [5] and [6] show that while the use of paper based dossiers is still the common practice within juridical environments some countries have made progress into changing to electronic dossiers and supporting the legal processes using case management and work flow management solutions. Despite the clear advantages that working with completely electronic dossiers has, as is demonstrated e.g. in the Austrian Ministry for Justice [5], many organizations haven't yet turned that into their daily practice yet. Changing dossiers containing paper documents to electronic dossiers containing electronic documents seems at first sight an easy job. But when the process around the handling of paper dossiers is studied carefully, and the types of documents involved, the transformation is not as easy as it seems. Also the traditional way of dealing a paper dossier is completely different from dealing with an electronic dossier. This makes that the acceptance of an electronic dossier by lawyers and judges is sometimes hard to get. In order to meet the requirements of the lawyers and judges, one important requirement is that an electronic dossier shouldn't involve more work than a paper-based dossier. This is one of the main requirements but not the only one. In this paper the development and implementation of electronic dossiers at the Dutch Council of State is described.