Digitalisation is revolutionising industries across the globe, promising efficiency and broadened access to services. The judicial system is no exception, with courts worldwide transitioning into more digitally oriented operations. This paper presents preliminary findings from a qualitative empirical study examining Norwegian judges’ experiences with the digitalisation processes of judicial activities. Through semi-structured interviews, three levels of friction in relation to the digitalisation of court work processes are observed: (1) the transition to electronic case filing and electronic communication (low friction), (2) the utilisation of digital tools within the courtroom (medium friction), (3) the integration of digital tools (such as AI) that aims to support the judge in decision-making processes (high friction).

This presentation will focus on the findings from the “medium friction” category which encompasses the daily experiences of judges using digital tools such as videoconferencing, electronic screens and recording devices during trial procedures. My findings suggest that most judges value the convenience that digital tools offer—in particular the facilitation of easy participation for witnesses and other parties through video conferencing. On the other hand, they also express concerns about the potential distractions these tools introduce into the judicial environment and how they can impact on courtroom dynamics. Furthermore, many participants describe how the physical presence of various digital devices divert attention from the procedures, with some judges drawing an analogy to the demanding role of an air traffic controller when multitasking between digital tools and more traditional administrative tasks. This dual role of judges (particularly in the District courts) as both an administrator and a de facto "air traffic controller" reflects an underlying tension between the perceived benefits and the practical challenges of embracing digital tools. The implications are not purely administrative but are deeply linked to the qualitative aspects of judicial proceedings and adjudication.

The purpose of this contribution is to describe the state of the digital transition of the judicial authorities (courts and public prosecutors' offices) in Switzerland. This transition is mainly being implemented by the Justitia 4.0 general project (programme) (see https://www.justitia40.ch/fr).

The general project Justitia 4.0 comprises four separate but closely coordinated projects:

- A legislative project at the level of the federal state but also of the 26 federated states (cantons)

- A project to build and operate a judicial communications platform called justitia.swiss (see https://www.justitia.swiss/fr)

- A project to provide an application for managing an electronic court file by adopting and adapting the Austrian solution to Switzerland.

- A project to support the judicial authorities in their transition (change management) from paper files to digital files under the best possible conditions.

In this contribution, we would like to inform you of the main features of each of these projects and their state of progress.

The qualified precedents from higher courts are fundamental decisions to promote the consistency of rulings in the Brazilian judicial system. A new system, developed as a result of a research project in Natural Language Processing (NLP) applied to the case files of the Conselho Nacional de Justiça (CNJ), is providing an efficient automation on defining suitable qualified precedents to support decisions on initial petitions of different Brazilian courts. The PEDRO System uses non supervised approach in order to recover qualified precedents from similar lawsuit decisions. This article describes how the Artificial Intelligence (AI) solution integrated into PEDRO was trained and how it is assisting the CNJ on identifying suitable qualified precedents related on a specific new lawsuit. This approach allows for flexible definition of similar processes by legal experts whose were in charge of verify the performances of this solution. As the application context of this solution requires focus on maximize the true positive, we present different analysis based on this metric depending on a free parameter of threshold. The solution presents accuracies in correlating qualified precedents to an initial petition above 80%. Furthermore, time is a crucial variable for any Brazilian court's procedural flow: the automated task of recovering qualified precedents in an initial petition takes only a fraction of the time compared to manual searches conducted by experts in the field of law.