The Research Institute on Judicial Systems

This paper discusses how laws and technology interact when e-government reforms are designed and deployed in highly regulated public sector organisations. The contribution focuses on how laws and regulations are re-designed into ICTs and the effect this design process has on the performance of public sector organisations. The paper builds on the concepts of functional simplification and closure to depict the particular process by which ICTs moulds laws and regulations. The case of the justice sector is discussed as exemplificative example to discuss how law and ICTs negotiate the regulation of organisational activities into techno-legal assemblages. Building on the finding of the case the paper provides a new dimension to be accounted for when the enactment of ICTs occurs in public sector organisations. The paper suggests that the technical, the legal, as well as the institutional properties that shape e-government projects need to be considered to better understand the impacts of e-government reforms on public sector organizations, the services they deliver, and the value that is generated for the citizens receiving public services.

The growing number of studies on ICT innovation experiences in the justice sector report a few easy successes and, far more frequently, difficult (and long) struggles to overcome multiple and often unexpected problems. Empirical analysis shows that these problems are the result of the complex interplay between technological, institutional, organizational and normative components of e-justice. What has been discovered is that the techno-institutional systems that are developed in the making of e-justice need not to be just technically functional, but also institutionally, organizationally and normatively compatible with the justice system. As the implementation of such systems breaks established practices and shared visions of what should be done, how and by whom, innovation requires the re-establishment of such agreements in the new situation. Cognitive, social and institutional features of the domain in which the innovation takes place thus play a paramount role in the innovation effort. This paper shows the interesting case of the development of an e-filing system, TéléRecours, in the French administrative justice sector. The system has been developed following a functional simplification strategy to cope with the technological, organizational and normative complexity of the endeavour. Such a strategy had been successfully adopted by several Northern European countries, but generally it had not been followed in Continental Europe, where much less successful attempts to create functional equivalents of paper-based procedures had been made. As the paper will attempt to explain, the functional simplification approach allowed the French justice administration to develop a functioning technology which is appreciated by the limited number of those who use it but that, due to its incapability of attaining institutional compatibility, is failing to exit the experimental phase.

Recent field research projects in the justice sector have shown how the development of e-justice entails much more than developing, installing and connecting technological devices or providing normative recognition to the use of the digital medium instead of the traditional one for the exchange of documents. This article presents an exploratory case-study describing the development of an e-filing and document-exchange system between lawyers and ordinary courts in the French justice administration. As it soon became apparent, the real challenge did not lie in the search, assembly and manufacture of technological tools, but in the creation of the governance net of relevant organizational actors that was needed to successfully sustain and implement the innovation. It concerned looking for acceptable compromises as to what could be done and how. The challenge was also to find ways to motivate users to actively participate in the creation of the new service which could not work without them. Furthermore, external and somewhat unforeseeable events also played a relevant role in defining choices, the tempo and the possibilities for the success of the system's design and implementation.