Developing a new legal information system

The German legal system is complex with its multitude of laws, ordinances and court decisions. There are numerous challenges: For example, the Federal and Länder governments do not document judgements in a uniform manner. Even lawyers invest a considerable amount of their precious and scarce time researching the various sources – for example the three well-known federal legal portals. The “NeuRIS” project is the first step towards gradually reducing this complexity.

This article describes the goal of the project, the current status including achievements and challenges, as well as the special approach that the interdisciplinary team applies in order to succeed.

The overall project “NeuRIS” consists of two central components: a federally owned collection system and data storage, as well as a legal information portal for the general public.

The development phase started in April 2022, with DigitalService, the central digitalisation unit of the federal government, working together with the Federal Ministry of Justice (BMJ) and the Federal Office of Justice (BfJ). The aim is to establish a central portal by the end of the legislative period that replaces the existing portals at federal level and better meets the demands of civil society, lawyers, academia, legal technology companies and publishers, etc. With the establishment of the portal, BMJ fulfils, among other things, the requirements of the Data Use Act. This implements the European Union's Open Data Directive, which aims to promote the publication of dynamic data and the creation of data interfaces (APIs).

However, this requires the renewal and modernisation of the federally owned data storage and collection system. To this end, the team is currently developing the new legal information system. This serves as a backend and is intended to enable efficient provision of legal information to the federal documentation offices - the Federal Constitutional Court, the supreme courts, the Federal Patent Court, the Higher Administrative Court of the Land of North Rhine-Westphalia and the Documentation Office for Standards. The ability to retrieve and connect legal information plays a major and decisive role in the transparency of our legal system. The NeuRIS project in its entirety thus meets the interests of the Federal Government’s open data strategy.

The project is complex. Legal information comprises judgements and decrees, ordinances, administrative regulations, but also documented independent and dependent legal literature. This data has a high degree of interconnectedness. The users of the platform are diverse and have different requirements for a successful environment. The system must therefore enable the documentation of legal information for the documentation offices and also serve as a source for federal judges, magistrates and employees of law firms and courts. With the front end – the legal information portal – additional, diverse target groups are added: In addition to legal tech companies that deal with digital business models and solutions for the legal market, the user groups also include, last but not least, the general public.

Another reason for the complexity of the project is that existing systems familiar to the staff in the documentation centres have to be replaced. The documentation process itself is also very complex in parts. Documentation in the context of legal information is not merely the digitisation of text, but the supplementation of the documentation units with good meta-information, such as linking the legal information to each other (active/passive citations) or the creation of headnotes for judgements. In the case of legal texts, the careful traceability of changes in laws plays a major role. All these aspects must be taken into account in a good documentation environment.

In contrast to other public sector digitisation projects we work in an interdisciplinary team and with agile software development methods right from the start. The development team includes product managers, designers and software developers – together with experts from the ministries and users from the documentation centres. It is crucial to involve them in the creation of the technical basis for a federally owned data basis as they will be the main users of this solution and expect a highly efficient system for the maintenance of legal information.

Since the legal information portal for civil society will draw its content from the documentation environment, we developed the environment first. In close coordination with the documentation centres involved at the Federal Court of Justice and the Federal Constitutional Court in Karlsruhe, we defined the scope of a so-called Minimum Viable Product (MVP). This means that we first put a system into operation that does not yet contain all the required functions, but already enables some central functions. In this way, we meet the requirement to produce product versions in rapid iterations that achieve an early benefit and that can perform better than the old solution.

The MVP will already include the data storage and documentation environment in the area of case law, with a focus on documentating the in-house case law of the Federal Constitutional Court and the Federal Supreme Court. In addition, the migration of existing data in the MVP will be accomplished. The migration is a major effort: It involves transferring the volume of existing data from the old system to the new system.

Challenges arise from the change in data storage technologies and the changed storage structures. Sometimes, data needs to be interpreted before it can be migrated. For example: Datasets sometimes display the figures for a date as "0000-00-00" . This stands for an unknown or previously unrecorded decision date - but who would have known that? Mapping in the new system should – and will – also be made more comprehensible.

The aim of this small-step development method is to further develop the product in a user-centred way based on the findings from live operation. Documentation centre staff participate in weekly concept tests and bi-weekly reviews to demonstrate the progress on the product. The interdisciplinary approach brings users and developers together and encourages all groups to think outside the box. Users are valued and respected as their knowledge is taken into account. That is what makes this form of cooperation extremely popular.

The users have permanent access to the product. Therefore, the DigitalService development team often receives unsolicited feedback, which in effect means that the project partners are interested in the product and simply test it. Both sides benefit from this: The development team continuously receives feedback on the functionality and usability and can use this to optimise the product. The documentation centres ensure in this way that their needs are met and at the same time "practise" using their future system on a daily basis. This increases confidence in the solution and users are already well acquainted with the system, making the final transition easier for them once the system is fully switched over. Teamwork makes the dream work.

Parallel to the legal information system, the development of the legal information portal will begin shortly. The legal information portal is to provide an easily accessible, barrier-free and usable website and an open interface to make the legal data available centrally and free of charge. Currently, this legal information can still be found on various portals: “Gesetze-im-Internet” (laws on the internet), “Rechtsprechung-im-Internet” (case law on the internet) and “Verwaltungsvorschriften-im-Internet” (administrative regulations on the internet). This needs to be changed and modernised. As with the collection system, this portal is also being developed iteratively and continuously refined on the basis of constant user tests.

In addition to significantly improving access to legal information for society as a whole, we as a development team are delighted that this modern form of cooperation is also bearing fruit at the administrative level and that developers and users are thus succeeding together.