Digitally Produced Judgements in Modern Court Proceedings

This paper shows an improvement of legal decision-making via digitallyproduced verdicts. We investigate the use of Artificial Intelligence(AI) in relation to rendering arbitrational verdicts. The data wasprovided by e-Court, the first private online court of the Netherlands.In our survey the standard debt collection proceedings under Dutch Civiland Procedural law are used as a case study. The introduction of thesubject matter is followed by an overview of the key-parameters requiredby e-Court for rendering a verdict in default cases. The reasoningmethodologies of Intelligent Systems in the legal domain are thendiscussed. Following this discussion, we will analyze the nature of thee-Court System to understand how it benefits from the various types ofIntelligent Systems. Subsequently, we will discuss the rationale behindthe choices made, the legal implications and the handling process withinthe public courts. We review in brief some expectations about thefurther developments and compare them with the current best practices atthe Dutch e-Court. Our contribution lies also in the investigation ofthe characteristics of the e-Court system for rendering default verdictsin debt collection proceedings. In our conclusion we will consider towhat extent intelligent systems will be used in the contemporary digitalcourt houses.