Context
The Ministry of Justice in Spain is leading a major project to implement artificial intelligence (AI) through the justice system. This initiative is part of a broader government push for digitalisation and aims to streamline the processing of legal documents. The project is being driven by the recognition that a significant amount of administrative work within the justice system involves repetitive tasks that can be effectively automated using AI.
Objectives
The Ministry’s AI strategy focuses on utilising natural language processing (NLP) to extract information from written documents. This information can then be used to classify documents, identify relevant details such as participants and dates, and even generate summaries in both legal and plain language. Ultimately, the project aims to improve efficiency by reducing the time spent on administrative tasks and freeing up human resources to focus on more complex legal matters.
Implementation
The Ministry has already begun implementing a number of AI services for document processing. These include automatic audio-to-text transcription of hearings and statements, document anonymisation and automatic document classification. The initial roll-out of these services is focused on specific regions and user groups, but the Ministry intends to expand them throughout the justice system in 2024. A key challenge will be ensuring the accuracy and fairness of the AI models, as well as maintaining data privacy throughout the document processing workflow.