Hilhorst & van Engers on E-dossier at the Dutch Council of State: Design, Implementation and Lessons Learned

Dr. Richard Hilhorst of Raad van State and Professor Dr. Tom van Engers of the Leibniz Center for Law at the University of Amsterdam, have published E-dossier at the Dutch Council of State: Design, Implementation and Lessons Learned, in ICT4JUSTICE 2009: Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference on ICT Solutions for Justice, Skopje, FYR Macedonia, September 24, 2009 13-32 (George Eleftherakis and Tom van Engers eds., 2009).

Here is the abstract of the paper:

Since the eighties of last centuries many developments in information science and artificial intelligence have influenced legal practice. These changes are for example visible in the way case decisions are distributed, i.e. by means of digital publishing, using portal technology and the extensive use of legal content management techniques that have improved access to and availability of case decisions. Artificial Intelligence applied to the legal domain (AI&Law), a research field potentially very important for legal practice including eGovernment, has lead to a more commonly use of legal expert systems and more recently an interest in developing representation techniques for automated argumentation support and more generally legal reasoning. However despite the effort of many researchers in this field only a few actually build argumentation support systems. Even fewer researchers actually conduct empirical research aimed at support lawyers and judges in practical situations. This is a pity since empirical research is a requisite if we aim at building systems that are to support lawyers and judges in their daily practice. Furthermore interesting developments are going on in different legal institutions, developments that bring the application of scientific results much closer. In this paper we focus on describing an example of these developments, i.e. the development of a system for creating and handling electronic dossiers within the Dutch Council of State (in Dutch: Raad van State).