Helping New Judges Answer Complex Legal Questions
General Description
The General Council of the Judiciary is the third division of power in Spain, and is responsible for judges’ professional education, as well as the operation of the court system.
Becoming a judge in Spain requires passing public service exams in which many candidates compete for very few places. However, once the exam is passed, the candidates become judges immediately, together with all their obligations and responsibilities.
The problem
A national survey of new judges identified the most typical problems they must face in their first few appointments. Many of them relate to ‘guardias’, shifts in which the judge is responsible 24/7 for everything which happens under his jurisdiction. For example, if a body is found at 2am along with ten thousand euros, what has a judge to do? It’s these cases which require pragmatism and experience, and so newly-appointed judges usually look to their mentors for professional advice. This traditional way of sharing judicial knowledge leads to contradictory situations relating to the same problem, decreasing the legal system’s efficiency.
The solution
In order to solve this situation, an intelligent system for frequently asked questions has been created, containing thousands of legal queries together with their answers. These questions and answers are based on the judicial experience of more than 400 judges from all over Spain.
The system, called Iuriservice, offers support for two judicial needs: 1) A frequent questions search system, and 2) a legal cases search system. The frequent questions search system lets the user navigate through the question-answer process using a plain-language interface, and the tool for
legal case administration offers a search and navigation application based on jurisprudence case law databases. In a typical scenario, a judge first looks for an answer to a specific question he introduces in the system. The answer to this question, if unclear, goes on to provide the information to look for in the case law database.
In order for the Frequent Questions system to find the closest question-answer match, it uses juridical ontologies. Firstly, it detects the main theme related to the question and classifies it by defined sub-domains using statistical calculations. The next step is searching files, databases, and other repositories, using strategies of morphological search, searches by synonyms, orthographic and semantic searches. In this way questions are answered according to their legal significance, and not the words used to make up the question. This legal meaning is defined by the system’s ontologies.
The tool for case law administration offers a search application for database of case law and legal decisions, using ontologies. This application lets judges carry out searches according to different categories: by judicial organisation, by topic, jurisdiction, dates, sentence number, and some additional concepts as defined in the ontology. This sub-system is similar to other judicial databases, but improved thanks to semantic technology, which lets us broaden the scope of the questions we ask.
Iuriservice has been evaluated by various groups of judges and is currently being deployed in the General College of the Judiciary in Barcelona as part of a final test-run.
Main Benefits of using the Semantic Web
The main benefits for the General College of the Judiciary include, amongst others:
- Pragmatic professional knowledge management of day-to-day relevance for judges.
- Encourages consistency in judicial decisions using the accumulated relevant knowledge.
- Reducing waiting time in new judges’ reactions to their first cases.
- Knowledge management (recycling questions and case law) based on context ‘comprehension’ rather than specific words.
