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Nowadays we can find a great deal of legislative information on the web. Countries, regions and municipalities make their regulatory and legal texts public through various spaces and official bulletins. The use of this information can be of great use in driving improvements in the sector: from facilitating the location of legal information to the development of chatbots capable of resolving citizens' legal queries.
However, locating, accessing and reusing these documents is often complex, due to differences in legal systems, languages and the different technical systems used to store and manage the data.
To address this challenge, the European Union has a standard for identifying and describing legislation called the European Legislation Identifier (ELI).
What is the European Legislation Identifier?
The ELI emerged in 2012 through Council Conclusions (2012/C 325/02) in which the European Union invited Member States to adopt a standard for the identification and description of legal documents. This initiative has been further developed and enriched by new conclusions published in 2017 (2017/C 441/05) and 2019 (2019/C 360/01).
The ELI, which is based on a voluntary agreement between EU countries, aims to facilitate access, sharing and interconnection of legal information published in national, European and global systems. This facilitates their availability as open datasets, fostering their re-use.
Specifically, the ELI allows:
- Identify legislative documents, such as regulations or legal resources, uniquely by means of a unique identifier (URI), understandable by both humans and machines.
- Define the characteristics of each document through automatically processable metadata. To this end, it uses vocabularies defined by means of ontologies agreed and recommended for each field.
Thanks to this, a series of advantages are achieved:
- It provides higher quality and reliability.
- It increases efficiency in information flows, reducing time and saving costs.
- It optimises and speeds up access to legislation from different legal systems by providing information in a uniform manner.
- It improves the interoperability of legal systems, facilitating cooperation between countries.
- Facilitates the re-use of legal data as a basis for new value-added services and products that improve the efficiency of the sector.
- It boosts transparency and accountability of Member States.
Implementation of the ELI in Spain
The ELI is a flexible system that must be adapted to the peculiarities of each territory. In the case of the Spanish legal system, there are various legal and technical aspects that condition its implementation.
One of the main conditioning factors is the plurality of issuers, with regulations at national, regional and local level, each of which has its own means of official publication. In addition, each body publishes documents in the formats it considers appropriate (pdf, html, xml, etc.) and with different metadata. To this must be added linguistic plurality, whereby each bulletin is published in the official languages concerned.
It was therefore agreed that the implementation of the ELI would be carried out in a coordinated manner by all administrations, within the framework of the Sectoral Commission for e-Government (CSAE), in two phases:
- Due to the complexity of local regulations, in the first phase, it was decided to address only the technical specification applicable to the State and the Autonomous Communities, by agreement of the CSAE of 13 March 2018.
- In February 2022, a new version was drafted to include local regulations in its application.
With this new specification, the common guidelines for the implementation of the ELI in the Spanish context are established, but respecting the particularities of each body. In other words, it only includes the minimum elements necessary to guarantee the interoperability of the legal information published at all levels of administration, but each body is still allowed to maintain its own official journals, databases, internal processes, etc.
With regard to the temporal scope, bodies have to apply these specifications in the following way:
- State regulations: apply to those published from 29/12/1978, as well as those published before if they have a consolidated version.
- Autonomous Community legislation: applies to legislation published on or after 29/12/1978.
- Local regulations: each entity may apply its own criteria.
How to implement the ELI?
The website https://www.elidata.es/ offers technical resources for the application of the identifier. It explains the contextual model and provides different templates to facilitate its implementation:
It also offers the list of common minimum metadata, among other resources.
In addition, to facilitate national coordination and the sharing of experiences, information on the implementation carried out by the different administrations can also be found on the website.
The ELI is already applied, for example, in the Official State Gazette (BOE). From its website it is possible to access all the regulations in the BOE identified with ELI, distinguishing between state and autonomous community regulations. If we take as a reference a regulation such as Royal Decree-Law 24/2021, which transposed several European directives (including the one on open data and reuse of public sector information), we can see that it includes an ELI permalink.
In short, we are faced with a very useful common mechanism to facilitate the interoperability of legal information, which can promote its reuse not only at a national level, but also at a European level, favouring the creation of the European Union's area of freedom, security and justice.
Content prepared by the datos.gob.es team.
Blog
Digital transformation affects all sectors, from agriculture to tourism and education. Among its objectives is the optimization of processes, the improvement of the customer experience and even the promotion of new business models.
The legal sector is no exception, which is why in recent years we have seen a boom in solutions and tools aimed at helping lawyers to perform their work more efficiently. This is what is known as LegalTech.
What is LegalTech?
The LegalTech concept refers to the use of new technological processes and tools to offer more efficient legal services. It is therefore an extensive concept, applying both to tools that facilitate the execution of tasks (e.g. financial management) and to services that take advantage of disruptive technologies such as artificial intelligence or blockchain.
The term LawTech is sometimes used as a synonym for LegalTech. Although some legal scholars say that they are distinct terms and should not be confused, there is no consensus and in some places, such as the UK, LawTech is widely used as a substitute for LegalTech.
Examples of LegalTech or LawTech tools
Through the application of different technologies, these tools can perform different functions, such as:
- Locating information in large volumes of judgments. There are tools capable of extracting the content of court rulings, using Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques. The aim of these tools is to facilitate the filtering and location of information of interest, as well as to make it available to the user in a visual way. This helps lawyers to carry out a better investigation and, consequently, to reduce the preparation time of cases and to define more solid procedural strategies. An example of a tool in this area is Ross Intelligence.
- Perform predictive analytics. In the market we also find tools aimed at analyzing sentences and making predictions that anticipate the behaviors and outcomes of, using artificial intelligence. These tools try to answer questions such as how long a judicial process will take, what is the most probable sentence or if there is a possibility of appeal. Tools of this type are LexMachina, Blue J, IBM's Watson or Jurimetria.
- Solving legal queries. Using AI-based conversational assistants (chatbots), answers can be given to various questions, such as how to overcome parking fines, how to appeal bank fees or how to file a complaint. These types of tools free lawyers from simple tasks, allowing them to devote their time to more valuable activities. An example of legal chatbots is DoNotPay.
- Assist in drafting contracts and lawsuits. LegalTech tools can also help automate and simplify certain tasks, generating time and cost savings. This is the case of Contract Express, which automates the drafting of standard legal documents.
- Resolving legal disputes. There are some disputes that can be resolved simply using open source technology tools such as Kleros, an online dispute resolution protocol o. Kleros uses blockchain to resolve disputes as fairly as possible.
The role of open data in Legal Tech
For all these tools to work properly, optimizing the work of jurists, it is necessary to have valuable data. In this sense, open data is a great opportunity.
According to the Legal Data Vision initiative, which uses UK data and was launched in March 2022, by LawtechUK and the Open Data Institute 67% of innovation companies claim to need access to data to develop transformative legal solutions and only 20% of lawyers claim that their organization captures data effectively. This initiative aims to promote responsible access to and use of legal data to drive innovation in the industry and deliver results that benefit society.
According to Gartner, legal areas are set to increase spending on technology solutions by 200% by 2025. In countries such as France, a large number of start-ups focused on this area are already emerging, many of which reuse open data. In Spain we are also experiencing an expansion of the sector, which will enable improvements to be implemented in the processes and services of legal companies. In 2021 there were more than 400 companies operating in this field and, globally, according to figures from Stadista, the sector generated more than €27 billion.
However, for this field to make further progress, it is necessary to promote access to judgments in machine-readable formats that allow mass processing.
In short, this is a booming market, thanks to the emergence of disruptive technologies. Legal firms need access to up-to-date, quality information that will enable them to perform their work more efficiently. One of the methods to achieve this is to take advantage of the potential of open data.
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Content prepared by the datos.gob.es team.