Open data and the rise of legal tech start-ups
 

The number of legal tech start-ups – organisations that specialise
in the legal and technology field – are rising in France. These
start-ups are aiming to reform the old practices of legal
professionals by offering legal documents on a digital platform and by
effectively automating the process and services of companies. One
method they are using to achieve this is by exploiting the potential
of open data. 

Since 2020, more legal data is being published under an open license,
where before 2020 data such as those published by the French National
Register of Commerce and Companies [https://www.infogreffe.fr/] was
accessible, but at a cost. An example of open legal data in France
that is being used by these start-ups is open data on judicial
decisions, which falls under the jurisdiction of the Court of
Cassation of France
[https://www.europeanlawinstitute.eu/membership/institutional-members/court-of-cassation-of-france/#:~:text=Court%20of%20Cassation%20of%20France&text=The%20Court%20of%20Cassation%20is,the%20application%20of%20the%20law.]
(the highest court in the French judicial system). This institution is
responsible for the publication and dissemination of open data on
judicial decisions across France. As of September 2021, all
information about the decisions made by the Court have been published
under an open license. Moreover, as of April 2022, the decisions of
the Court of Appeal in France have been published as open data,
excluding information on criminal matters. To ensure that they are
compliant with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)
[https://gdpr.eu/], the Court has developed a new technical
architecture that anonymises decisions before the data is published.
The Court plans to publish decisions from other judicial courts under
an open license between June 2023 and December 2025, following a
timeline decided by a decree
[https://www.legifrance.gouv.fr/jorf/id/JORFTEXT000043426865] adopted
on 28 April 2021. 

For more open data news explore the data.europa.eu news page
[https://data.europa.eu/en/news-events/news]. 

 

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Publication Date/Time
2022-07-18T11:30:00+00:00
Making data available has enabled young technological and legal
companies to enter European markets