Transformation digitale dans le domaine juridique : analyse des enjeux à travers une approche par processus

Abstract

About twenty years ago, some controversies highlighted the inefficiencies of the Belgian legal system, pushing it to modernize. After the failure of some projects linked to a form of inertia, mainly due to a lack of means and a reluctance of the actors to change, some technologies have started to emerge since 2014. Thus, for the past few years, the profession of legal professionals has been changing. On the one hand, lawyers, via their professional organization, are implementing new applications. On the other hand, the SPF Justice is trying to modernize Justice via both the renewal of computer equipment and the development of new platforms. In 2015, these two organizations agreed that the digitalization of Justice was a common issue. However, this study highlights many dysfunctions of the platforms put in place and incompatibility between the systems, not allowing digitalization to have the positive effect it could have because it is held back by various elements. Moreover, it is since the Covid-19 health crisis that we have been seeing a real change in the sector, not only because the actors are forced to use more and more digital tools, but also an awareness among the actors of the need to use technology in their work is being felt. Therefore, the boundary between the legal sector and digitalization, which has been present for a long time, is gradually fading. This study contains four main parts. First, a literature review is conducted in order to build a solid theoretical framework. It includes an analysis of the evolution of digitalization in the legal sector and the main technologies used by legal professionals. It then focuses on the civil procedure by providing a description of the process and defines performance indicators in order to analyze the impact of digitalization on the performance of this procedure. The literature review concludes with the identification of various research questions. Then, the methodology used to conduct the empirical research is described and is followed by the presentation of the results. Finally, by bringing together the findings in the literature and those in the empirical research, the results are discussed with a critical perspective and answers to the research questions are provided. The study concludes by putting forward some recommendations for the legal sector, along with avenues for further research.