Justi­tia 4.0 Project – Dig­i­tal Trans­for­ma­tion of the Legal Sys­tem in Switzer­land

In its meet­ing of Feb­ru­ary 15, 2023, the Fed­er­al Coun­cil approved the dis­patch on the new Fed­er­al Act on Plat­forms for Elec­tron­ic Com­mu­ni­ca­tion in the Judi­cia­ry. The law is intend­ed to pro­vide the foun­da­tion for the imple­men­ta­tion of the ​“Justi­tia 4.0” project – a nation­al com­mu­ni­ca­tion plat­form that will enable legal com­mu­ni­ca­tion between author­i­ties, the legal pro­fes­sion and the judi­cia­ry on a dig­i­tal lev­el.

What has already been the stan­dard in oth­er pro­fes­sions – in a sim­i­lar form – for years decades, will not be intro­duced for lawyers before 2025. It con­firms once again that lawyers find it very dif­fi­cult to use new tech­nolo­gies. Here’s the fol­low­ing in this regard: Although dig­i­tal fil­ings have been express­ly per­mit­ted by the respec­tive pro­ce­dur­al codes for sev­er­al years (includ­ing Art. 130 ZPO; Art. 110 StPO; Art. 21a VwVG; see also §71 VRG/ZH) , in our expe­ri­ence this ​“offer” is (too) rarely used. How­ev­er, not only with a view to ​“Justi­tia 4.0” do we have to think out­side our own box in and take a hard stance on what we are doing. We have a respon­si­bil­i­ty not only to our envi­ron­ment, but also to our clients and – from the per­spec­tive of the judi­cia­ry – to the tax­pay­ers. Work­ing with dig­i­tal files pro­duces less paper and is usu­al­ly more effi­cient, just to men­tion the fact that you can use Adobe­Pro to search for spe­cif­ic key­words in exten­sive files. Or when, excep­tion­al­ly, you copy entire pas­sages of text for a cita­tion in your own legal doc­u­ment. Or with regard to remote work. In today’s age of ubiq­ui­tous arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence (Chat­G­PT, DeepL, etc.), we believe it is enor­mous­ly impor­tant to use new tech­nolo­gies, not least in one’s own record keep­ing and lit­i­ga­tion.

The fact that the can­tons are being allowed to set up an inde­pen­dent plat­form is regret­table. The project is already tak­ing a long time – it was ini­ti­at­ed in 2016 and actu­al­ly even back in 2012 through a motion by Coun­cil of States mem­ber Pirmin Bischof. Should indi­vid­ual can­tons intro­duce their own plat­form, the project will prob­a­bly be delayed fur­ther to enable inter­op­er­abil­i­ty between the plat­forms. In any case, giv­en the slow pace of imple­men­ta­tion, doubts are already emerg­ing as to whether the 2025 dead­line for intro­duc­tion can actu­al­ly be met.