According to Acteurs Publics, the Ministry of Justice decided to abandon the development of DataJust on Thursday, January 13. The objective of this project was the creation of an official compensation repository, based on artificial intelligence, aiming to inform victims of personal injury accidents but also to provide decision support to judges in charge of estimating the amount of compensation.
It was during the containment, on March 27, 2020, that DataJust, automated processing of personal data, was authorized by decree. Given the context, it initially went unnoticed before arousing strong criticism, including from legal professionals. Sophie Ferry, president of the Prospective and Innovation Commission of the National Bar Council had declared:
“We are not opposed in principle to this project, but we cannot be in favor of a situation without any guarantee of protection of the rights of individuals and in which we have not been involved”
“On December 30, the Council of State approved the decree and rejected the petition of the association for the promotion and defense of fundamental freedoms in the digital environment ‘La Quadrature du Net’, which concerned ‘a processing of personal data that was collected for purposes clearly incompatible with those provided for by the DataJust processing’ . The abandonment of the project, at first sight incomprehensible, would be due to a too great complexity of the development.
DataJust, a 2-year experiment
The treatment authorized by this decree aimed at developing an algorithm, in charge of extracting in an automatic way and exploiting the data contained in the court decisions relating to the compensation of the physical injuries. More specifically, the aim was to identify the amounts requested and offered by the parties to the proceedings, the assessments proposed in the context of out-of-court settlement procedures and the amounts awarded to victims by the courts. The development team stated that:
“victims would be able to compare, with full knowledge of the facts, the compensation offers made by insurers and the amounts they could obtain before the courts; lawyers would have reliable information enabling them to advise their clients; magistrates would have a tool to help them quantify damages thanks to easier access to finely targeted case law”.
This experiment, set up for a period of two years, was based on data extracted from appeal decisions rendered between January 1, 2017 and December 31, 2019 by the administrative and civil courts in the context of litigation involving compensation for personal injury. The planned analyses concerned:
- the names and surnames of natural persons mentioned in court decisions, except for those of the parties; the selection of a particular category of persons from these data alone was prohibited.
- identification elements of natural persons,
- data and information relating to the prejudices suffered,
- data relating to professional life and financial situation,
- the opinions of the doctors and experts who examined the victim and the amount of their fees,
- data relating to criminal offences and convictions and data relating to civil wrongdoing,
- the number of court decisions.
The data can only be kept for 2 years
The decree provided that:“the information and personal data recorded are kept for the time necessary for the development of the algorithm, this period may not in any case exceed two years from the publication of the Datajust decree.”
Incomplete and biased database
This left just over two months to complete the development of DataJust, which was becoming increasingly unfeasible within the time frame. The first instance decisions had not been taken into account, so the algorithm’s database was biased. On the other hand, the expertise of a personal injury is very complicated:“the mobilization of necessary means, in particular to study and prevent the algorithmic biases, was too consequent to reach an indisputable level of performance”, reported Acteurs Publics.
The Ministry of Justice has not confirmed that the development of DataJust has been stopped.
