# Challenges When Using Jurimetrics in Brazil--A Survey of Courts
## 5 Conclusions  
The survey found that doing quantitative research [30] or jurimetrics by querying jurisprudential databases of the Brazilian courts faces technical barriers and other non-technical barriers, as despite the legal framework provided by the FIA [3] and subsequent resolutions from the CNJ [10; 11; 12; 25; 26], few Courts comply with the law to its full extent. Also, the lack of standards to access those courts makes querying this information more resource intensive, requiring more programmer-hours to be implemented. The use of CAPTCHA in many search engines also makes the automation of the queries even harder. That did not prevent the growth of jurimetrics in Brazil, and some interesting results have been published since the enactment of the FIA [3; 4; 5; 16; 18; 30]. Nevertheless, it is an important barrier and slows progress in this area. It would be of great value if the courts defined a common API to access their jurisprudential databases, where limits could be imposed per user, as it is done by many software companies. From the point of view of the access of information process (AIP) requests, when the researcher needs to address the court in search of an answer that is not published, even with the establishment of FIA [3] and the development of platform for the sending of requests, the courts in general do not comply with the regulations. There is also a great deficiency in the platforms used for the submission of requests for access to information that sometimes come with the minimum requirements set out in FIA (for example, the frequent absence of the field to appeal). At this point, the unification of platforms between the courts would represent a great gain. Also, it was found that is the courts are really behind in the application of current information management practices, since there is a confusion between the concepts of information management and document management. Regarding our initial hypothesizes:  
* Hypothesis 1: The legal framework is not enough--The framework provided by the FIA [3] is a great first step, and the resolutions from the CNJ [10; 11; 12; 13] provided some progress in the right direction, but as it was pointed out by Artigo 19 [14], and comparing our current framework with international references as the Inter-American Declaration of Principles on Freedom of Expression [8], that we still have a long way to go;
* Hypothesis 2: Current systems are preventing progress in this area--As the survey showed, current systems are heterogeneous, many prevent automated queries, lots of processes are not digital, but digitized as paper scans, making the progress harder;
* Hypothesis 3: Courts are not prepared and neither abide by the current laws--As the AIP survey showed, 63% of the courts did not reply the AIP [3] and there are no mechanisms for appealing to denied requests even if the law says so. Based on this results, we made the following recommendations as the next steps to a more transparent system:  
* Amend the FIA [3] by making digital process mandatory and defining standards based on best Open Data practices [16; 17; 22] to make this data available;* Ban the use of CAPTCHA, favoring the imposition of number of requests per user as a way to avoid server overloads, and have mechanisms for a user to request an increase on these limits upon justification (research for instance);
* Adopt a common API for all courts;
* Increase the supervision and establish mechanisms to punish courts that are not abiding by laws;
* Increase resources, training, and provision of technical expertise to the courts that are lacking that to be compliant. Even though our gloomy hypothesis were confirmed by our research, we see a positive future for our society, as some progress was made, and watchdogs NGO like Artigo 19 [14] are putting more pressure on our judiciary.