Government efforts to make better use of digital justice data - including court judgments - could face a backlash from a sceptical public, one of the principal advocates for open justice data warns today. In a report Justice Data Matters, the Legal Education Foundation (LEF) says research shows that making information from court records available to commercial organisations could undermining already fragile confidence in the justice system.

The research, by Ipsos, also found public scepticism about computerised outcome-prediction systems. The LEF described the findings as a wake-up call for policy makers, noting that the official online court judgments database was set up this year without any public consultation. 

Opinion polling and deliberative workshops conducted for the research showed very low awareness of courts data: 70% of participants admitted knowing ‘nothing’ or ‘not very much’ about information in court records. Nearly three quarters of participants - 74% - said they knew ‘not very much’ or ‘nothing at all’ about who had access to judgments. 

However the research indicated a general initial preference for privacy over open justice. Only 47% of participants said they feel ‘comfortable’ that parties in a court case should be able to access and make use of information from court records. A slight majority, 56%, believed data should be available to HM Courts & Tribunals Service. Technology companies were at the bottom of the list: only 18% of respondents were comfortable with their access to information from court records. 

‘Participants expected that those who access court judgments must have to jusitify whey then need to do so and must be held accountable if they use the information in a  different way than they were permitted to, such as selling it to third parties,' the report states. They also felt 'very strongly' that judgments in minor cases should not be available after a certain period.

Participants were surprised by the level of information in court judgments. Even some who had been involved in cases themselves were unaware that judgments might be publicly accessible. Judges’ remarks about the reliability of witnesses were a particular concern.  

‘There were strong feelings that the move towards court judgments being available in bulk, in machine readable format, had been made without transparency and without informing the public.'

The LEF, whose research director Dr Natalie Byrom has been a strong advocate for collecting and sharing courts data, calls for efforts to build a public mandate in this area.  

Byrom said: 'Improving the quality and availability of data has the real potential to increase innovation and deliver a wide range of benefits for the justice system, not least helping to support disadvantaged users and cutting delays and backlogs. Yet we know from attempts to share NHS patient data or the reaction to the school exam results algorithm in 2020 that realising the benefits of data requires investing in building a public mandate for its use.

'This research gives us an invaluable insight into the public’s views and concerns about the use of justice data, and should act as a wake-up call to those of us designing effective arrangements to oversee how data is accessed and shared in the future.'

 

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