How Digital Can Change Justice – Predictive Justice in Practice

As a Business Angel I see quite a few startup ideas and the concept of Predictice has struck me as a major experiment of digital applied to public service (disclosure: I liked it so much they got some investment from me too, just for the sake of following up their evolution more closely!).

The concept is to use all available judicial decisions for France (soon to be open-source but elsewhere available on some professional databases) to analyze the data using syntax associations and thus be able to give statistics on the expectations of a decision concerning a particular case. To be relevant, the algorithms have to be built with professionals using a specific process; so algorithms are being progressively developed in several judicial fields (family, private property etc).

The results are quite astounding as the system can give the average chance and compensation amount in fine grained detail based on the details of the situation and even the geographic location of the jurisdiction (which will certainly raise some eyebrows as it appears that there are regional differences).

The interesting thing is that it brings justice to a new level. It does not replace lawyers or judges, but it brings the debate to another level. As a support to the work of humans it brings substantial value. It gives valuable feedback to jurisdictions. More generally, with this startup Big Data transforms the way justice is being practiced.

There are certainly many fields of public service that are ripe to be disrupted in the same manner.