10 THE ITALIAN LAW JOURNAL NOS. 1-2 (2024)
Legal Metrics Extracted from Court Decisions. A Focus on Personal Injury Compensation
by Christophe Quézel-Ambrunaz and Vincent Rivollier This article explores the extraction of legal metrics from court decisions, with a focus on personal injury compensation in France. It begins by discussing the challenges of accessing and structuring data from judicial decisions, highlighting legal and non-legal barriers. Despite recent legislative efforts to open up access to judicial decisions as open data, significant obstacles remain in the extraction and processing of relevant information. The article delves into the specific case of personal injury compensation, where empirical and quantitative approaches have been widely utilised due to the absence of official guidelines and the diverse nature of compensation methods. It also discusses the failure of the Datajust project, which aimed to create a tool for modeling judges’ decisions on personal injury compensation but was ultimately abandoned due to technical and regulatory challenges. Looking ahead, the article discusses prospects for the future of legal metrics, including ongoing government initiatives to improve access to judicial data and harness artificial intelligence for case orientation. It also highlights the potential of reforms in civil information systems, such as the Portalis project, to provide new insights and standardise the structure of court decisions. DOI 10.23815/2421-2156.ITALJ ISSN 2421-2156
