National Brazilian judicial database (DataJud): transparency and better administration of justice

The use of data about judicial procedures is crucial to improve the overall administration of justice, define strategies for justice institutions, promote transparency, broaden access, and enhance confidence in the justice system. Nevertheless, data collected worldwide has been sparse and inconsistent as most countries have been late to start steadily adopting information technology in the Justice System. Brazil is an exception, as the country has been collecting digital judicial data systematically since 2009. Despite its enormous geographical and population dimensions and its heterogeneity of legal systems among the states, Brazil managed to develop and implement the National Database of the Brazilian Judiciary (DataJud) as a result of 15 years of studies and experience coordinated by the National Council of Justice (CNJ) and with the participation of the Brazilian Judiciary actors. The paper presents DataJud, the main previous events that favoured its creation, its characteristics, and two results and firsts benefit of the platform: Dashboard of Statistics of the Judiciary and Dashboard of Major Litigants.


INTRODUCTION
Justice is specifically referred to in the 16 o Sustainable Development Goal-SDG, "Peace, Justice and Strong Institutions", and is a transversal subject affecting other SDGs [7].Justice contributes to economic growth, reduces conflicts and violence, and trust in institutions [5].
However, the administration of Justice is still a challenge.It consumes many resources; the backlogs of cases and workload are huge, and the delay in the decisions often impacts the right to a fair trial.Still, databases walk slowly, with insufficient data available to allow quantitative evaluation of results and better administration of Justice [4].In a report of 2022, the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) asserts that "Justice systems worldwide have been slow to adopt data collection and analysis as a part of operations.Court administration data about users, cases, timelines, and case results are notoriously unavailable or inconsistent between court levels, courthouses, or regions.Data about the full extent of public legal needs is only just starting to be collected [9]".Data generated by judiciaries is historically paper-based, and little quantitative information has been extracted from judicial data.This trend is changing in recent years, basically because of the adoption and use of Case Management Systems, which generate a vast amount of digital data.The judicial database creates "valuable opportunities to measure the overall performance of the judiciary, identify key areas for improvement and evaluate the impact of justice reforms [5]."In the World Bank working paper, the authors refer to the "data revolution" in Justice and propose a framework to use judicial data better.They suggest using judicial data to measure and diagnose courts, for example, by evaluating the backlog, courts' productivity, and several other court performance indicators.Data evaluation also allows for identifying bottlenecks, enabling the allocation of resources more effectively and efficiently.They also recommend experimentation by rigorously evaluating the impact of innovative judicial policies and justice reforms.Another promising use of data in the judiciary involves machine learning (ML) applications.Although it is still in the beginning and raises important debates, some innovative tools are already in use, such as similar case push systems, document-assisted generation systems, risk prediction systems, and filtering systems [8].
Aware of the opportunities of data to enhance efficiency, besides improving quality and other justice principles such as access and transparency, the Brazilian judiciary implemented in 2020 the Data-Jud.Brazil has been systematically collecting court data since 2009.Nowadays, over 98.9% of new cases, all criminal, civil, or administrative, are filed electronically [6], contributing to the robustness of the database.Although the systems may differ between state courts or judicial instances, all must send data in XML format to DataJud.In this paper, we describe the steps taken to implement DataJud, its characteristics, and panel examples with benefits in terms of transparency and availability of information to improve the Brazilian administration of Justice.

DATAJUD BENEFITS
DataJud has a new paradigm: active transparency.DataJud favours what suggests being essential in statistic databases: the possibility for the public to detect the activities developed by the judiciary, to favour the performance monitored by higher judicial bodies and the planning of future projects, the promotion of public policies for judiciary reforms, and the evaluation of justice work by experts [3].In the next sections, we present two products highlighted for the NJC as significant results of the DataJud.

Dashboard of Statistics of the Judiciary
This dashboard presents monthly the main general information about the judiciary.It is very detailed and organised into seven main menus containing submenus.Figure 2 demonstrates a random filter search.
It is possible to notice how many decisions the judge that works in a specific court has concluded, such as hearings, participations, court orders, and others.It also displays a chart with the number of decisions per month.
The main menus are procedural management, productivity, indicators, times, categories, subjects, and maps.The procedural management menu presents information as the number of pendent, filled, waiting decisions, decided, suspended, and others.The productivity menu details the number of judicial actions, such as decisions, injunctions, hearings, court orders, and appeals.The indicators menu informs the level of informatisation (ratio of electronic cases to the total number of cases), index of pending cases (ratio of pendent cases at the end of the year against total cases analysed in the year), and clearance rate (ratio of resolved cases against incoming cases).For example, consulting the dashboard, anyone can observe that the Brazilian clearance last rate is 102,14% (02/2022).The time menu concerns the length of proceedings, considering the time until the decision, the time of the pendent cases and others.The category and subject menu present data according to the Unified Table of Judiciary.The map menu presents indicator data displayed on the Brazilian map.All data can be aggregated or filtered by some characteristics and downloaded in CSV format.

The Dashboard of Major Litigants
The dashboard presents data about the new and pending lawsuits for the 20 major litigants in each court in the state, federal, and labour segments and by each judicial unit.As the dashboard permits comparisons between years, it "will be possible to verify progress in reduction of litigation for each entity and to identify potential problems that caused a backlog of cases related to one party [6]".The dashboard is divided into four main menus: major litigants, major sector, comparison with the previous year, and map.It indicates the bottlenecks of the justice system.For example, a search of aggregated data for November 2022 detects that almost 4% of the total cases are against the Brazilian Social Security Institute.

CONCLUSION
Data is essential to help judiciaries in the administration of justice.From basic efficiency problems to more complex ones, a justice database opens many possibilities to improve access and transparency.The Brazilian judiciary successfully implemented the DataJud, a highly detailed justice database.Many steps were necessary to get to the current stage.The active coordination of the NCJ and the participation of all Brazilian courts were fundamental to the project's conclusion.We presented the chronology of the DataJud implementation and two products already available for consultation by citizens, justice policymakers, the academy, and other actors.By describing the initiative, we focused on organisational, legal, and institutional aspects.The practical results that link the use of DataJud with improvement in the administration of justice will be the subject of future research.

Figure 1 :
Figure 1: Summary of the main events preceding DataJud institution.Elaborated by the authors.

Figure 2 :
Figure 2: Productivity menu query excerpt for a random filtering option.