Success story
European Court of Human Rights
Industry• Legal/Government

Solutions• OpenText™ Document Management,
eDOCS Edition• OpenText™ eDOCS SharePoint Integration• OpenText™ eDOCS Search Connector forMicrosoft® FAST

Results

European Court of HumanRights manages growing caseload with OpenText
Enterprise-wide OpenText™ eDOCS deployment
drives court’s digital document management strategy

Increased productivity by 60%
Improved capacity and scalability
to handle growing case anddocument volumes
Enhanced enterprise-wide court
documentation search
Eliminated costly, time-consumingpaper-based records and processes“Overall, we’ve significantly improved
productivity at the court since theintroduction of CMIS with OpenText
eDOCS at the core.”John Hunter

Head of IT Division
European Court of Human Rights

European Court of Human Rights manages growing case load with OpenText

The European Court of Human Rights (ECHR), based in Strasbourg,France, employs around 800 staff and handles more than 64,000
case applications each year. The court is responsible for making
case law and other documentation publically available and receives
more than 4.6 million visitors to their website each year. A longtime
OpenText eDOCS user, ECHR upgraded to the latest release tosupport their continued innovation and growing workload, with atleast 80 different document types, over 3,000 document templates
and multiple languages to contend with.
“Overall, we’ve significantly improved productivity at the court since
the introduction of CMIS with OpenText eDOCS at the core. For
example, last year alone, through our document template solution,
we produced more than 500,000 letters. Compared with the oldmanual system, this enhanced the process by 60 percent. As a result,
we’re now a much more streamlined organization,” commented John
Hunter, head of IT Division, ECHR.
Document management is central to ECHR’s information strategy. By
capturing all types of inbound and outbound documents, case notes,
emails and more, the court has a complete view of any case, applicationor other interaction. The solution not only manages documents related
to the court’s core activity, but also personnel, finance and otheradministration documentation.
Email is one of the most commonly used communication formats,and consequently volumes have increased considerably. ECHR uses
OpenText email archiving to archive, index and retrieve email in thesame way as any other content type. This alleviates burden on the email
system, ensures long term storage and provides the same powerfulsearch capabilities as regular documents.

All documents are categorized and, when required, are fed into the casemanagement system. Public documents, such as case histories for caselaw, are made available through a public knowledge base. Documentationis also created in the PDF/A format for long term digital preservation.
Document approval plays an important role at ECHR. All approvals are
now handled via a centralized workflow system based on Microsoft®
SharePoint®. All users can instantly check on the status of any tasks,
and leverage eDOCS to call up any related documentation.
“OpenText eDOCS has given us truly enterprise-wide search capability
in conjunction with Microsoft SharePoint and FAST. Users report thatthey can find what they need and quickly, further enhancing theproductivity gains the solution is providing,” added Hunter.
The ECHR system, HUDOC, leverages the intuitive interface of eDOCS toallow users to easily find the case law they are looking for. HUDOC alsooffers users many new features, including the ability to leverage searchrefiners to easily locate the judgments they are looking for or focus theirsearch on cases selected for the Court’s Official Reports. New content
has also been added, such as legal summaries of more significant cases.
Documents can be downloaded in both Word and PDF format and users
can create their own RSS feeds.
The search capability extends beyond the court staff. With more than
4.6 million visitors to the public website, downloading around 196 million
documents last year, the ability to find the right document quickly iscentral to providing a good user experience.

“This new version will
help legal professionals
throughout the Councilof Europe States search
the court’s case law
more rapidly andmore efficiently.”
Sir Nicolas Bratza

President
European Court of Human Rights

European Court of Human Rights manages growing case load with OpenText

The President of the court, Sir Nicolas Bratza stated, “The court attaches
great importance to the effective dissemination of its case law and webelieve that this new version of HUDOC will help legal professionals
throughout the Council of Europe States to search the court’s caselaw more rapidly and more efficiently. This makes a major contribution
to better domestic implementation of the Convention.”With all cases and associated documentation now managed electronically,management reporting has become practical, speedy and reliable.
Statistics are now simpler to produce and trends can be spotted andaction taken accordingly. ECHR staff can now be confident that when
they access a case, they have access to all related documentation.
The court has also introduced electronic signatures into their workflow
processes, significantly reducing cost and time needed to print, signand scan documents requiring signature. A full audit trail is retained,aiding internal compliance.

ECHR undertakes extensive communication with various government
departments and agencies throughout Europe and beyond. They can
now securely transmit or make available for download a complete caseor a single document. With more than 25 governments already using
this approach, ECHR is moving toward an entirely digital document
management strategy, eliminating the wasteful and costly productionof paper copies of documents.
The court’s IT system constantly evolves with their growth in users,
the implementation of new working methods and the acquisition ofnew software.
“Information technology is crucial to the survival of the court.
Dealing with the ever-increasing volumes of documents and cases iscentral to our IT policy. This latest upgrade paves the way for future
growth and cements our long standing and successful relationshipwith OpenText,” added Hunter.

About OpenText

OpenText, The Information Company™,
enables organizations to gain insight
through market leading information
management solutions, on-premises orin the cloud. For more information aboutOpenText (NASDAQ: OTEX, TSX: OTEX)
visit opentext.com.
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