If Data Science puts itself at the service of law: the justice becomes ‘’predictive’’ thanks to the AI.The Tribunal of Pisa makes available the archive of the sentences to the researchers of the Lider Lab of the Dirpolis Institute of the Sant'Anna School

The first predictive justice platform was born at the Sant’Anna School, with a project that aims to develop an analysis methodology of the case-law materials by combining ‘’machine learning’’ techniques and ‘’big data’’ analysis. Developments and updates are already available at the web site www.predictivejustice.eu, a web site which has been created by Lider Lab (International and Comparative Law Research), coordinated by Giovanni Comandé, Full Professor in Comparative Private Law of the Dirpolis Institute (Institute of Law, Politics and Development) of the Sant’Anna School, with the collaboration of the the Department of Excellence EMbeDS (Economics and Management in the era of Data Science), whose IT and computational infrastructure is able to ‘’manage continuous flows of big datasets and support sophisticated artificial intelligence models for the elaboration and the comprehension of the legal reasoning” as it is highlighted by Dr Daniele Licari, data scientist at EMbeDS.

The Project started in 2019 thanks to the collaboration between the LIDER Lab and the Tribunal of Genoa, which has been followed by the recent agreement with the Tribunal of Pisa for the development of anonymisation and pseudonymisation protocols of case-law materials. As far as the project’s potential is concerned, the President of the Tribunal of Pisa, Maria Giuliana Civinini comments: ‘’This agreement, which has been delayed because of the Covid-19 emergency, is extremely important and timely applied for the development of the Project, for its search-purposes, and for our Tribunal as well. The use of the decisions stored in our IT systems was envisaged to test and implement an anonymization program in view of the establishment of a case-law database that can be navigated with semantic methods”. “The purpose – explains the President Civinini – is to offer a double support and service to the professionals, citizens, and judges. Professionals and citizens will be able to have a better and more accessible knowledge of case-law and the possibility to evaluate the potential solution of a certain dispute, while judges will be able to obtain a deeper knowledge of  jurisprudence, because of the fact that it can be analyzed in an aggregate way, for decision-making, as far as sensible matter are concerned such as those related to the maintenance and alimony in case of separation or divorce or those related to personal injury compensation. This will consent to adopt more conscious decisions that will guarantee and implement, at the most, the principles of equity, equality of treatment and proper consideration of the related problems”.

“Through the analysis conducted by the artificial intelligence, the judge who makes use of it will be able indeed to reconstruct guidelines, common tendencies and practices of case-law. It’s about automating and generalizing an already developed methodology and in use at the Permanent Observatory on Personal Injury Damages, comments Giovanni Comandé who adds: ‘’Introducing a semantically enriched mechanism of access to the jurisprudential data – adds the Professor – along with the explanation of the legal reasoning the effect on judges, policy makers, academics will be disruptive. The relapses in terms of reduction of the disputes and the possibility of mutually agreed solutions between the parties to the dispute have been taken for granted”.

Simultaneously with the launch of the Predictive Justice website, the Lider Lab also announces that it has renewed its website : www.lider-lab.it which is much easier now to navigate and permits the users to better navigate its contents among the research, training and third mission activities in the six fields of research (Intellectual Property, Artificial Intelligence Governance and Law, Privacy, Law and Data Governance, Health Law, Family Law, Civil Liability and Insurance) through also the funded international Projects. A vast educational offer is available as well for the professionals through advanced education courses, seminars and webinars.