How information technology contributes to justice efficiency

This paper explores how information technology (IT) contributes to judicial efficiency, that is, to what extent investment in IT helps shorten court delays. It uses information collected by the European Commission for the Efficiency of Justice (CEPEJ), a body of the Council of Europe, from the ministries of justice of 16 of its member countries. A part of this survey, conducted every two years by the CEPEJ, focuses on the judicial services information system, which every country describes by filling up checkboxes. The research augments CEPEJ data by building a maturity index from that material. That index, designed as a proxy to IT asset, is then used as an input to a data envelopment analysis (DEA), alongside two types of human assets : judges and other staff. The average court delays, in criminal and civil matters, are used as outputs to the DEA. One first stage of the analysis applies the directional distance function (DDF), a second one applies the Shapley value, so as to weigh each input’s contribution to the distance from the efficient frontier. Results suggest IT does indeed contribute to shorter court delays, but also that other factors are at play.