France Drama: Say Goodbye to Judicial Analytics

As the legal tech sector intensifies its global expansion, governments around the world are grappling with ethical, technical, and political questions about public access to electronic court records. The digitization of these records has allowed artificial intelligence and machine learning companies to collect this public data, synthesizing it in ways that allow them to model how individual judges rule on particular types of matters.

On March 23, 2019, the French government intervened in the debate, passing a law that bans the publication of statistical information derived from judicial analytics. Article 33 of the Justice Reform Act prohibits anyone from revealing the patterns of a judge and their rulings, threatening a five-year prison sentence as the maximum punishment.

Mon dieu!

(Thankfully Trellis isn’t planning on going abroad….)

Originally published at https://blog.trellis.law.