# Challenges When Using Jurimetrics in Brazil--A Survey of Courts
## 4 Results and Discussion
### Court Web Systems Survey  
After looking into each of the 27 State Courts and two Supreme Courts, we found that no API is provided to gather jurisprudence data, which means that any jurimetric study has to rely on web-scraping of the court website. By reviewing each court website, it was found that there are no standards in terms of search engine, search fields, and data shown as result of a search. Many courts had a CAPTCHA in place, making automated queries harder to implement. Also, not all of the courts allowed the download of the full court decision for a given case. During the research, we found that the courts of the States of Santa Catarina and Rio de Janeiro are changing their systems and provide two search engines for court cases, thus raising the total number of court case search engines to 31 systems. Regarding the development of these systems, the most commonly found option was in-house development by the information technology staff member of the courts. Twenty-two of the 31 systems were developed by the court's own staff. As each one of these 22 systems were developed by a different team, one would end up with 22 different proprietary systems to interface with and to build a web-scraper for. In the case of the Rio de Janeiro State Court, the original system was developed in-house, and in the case of the second one, called GSA, we could not identify whether it was in-house or not. The remaining eight courts adopted the same system, called e-SAJ (Electronic System of Automated Justice), developed by Softplan, one of the largest software development companies in Brazil in the Justice, Infrastructure, and e-government segments (Figure 1). They did that regardless of the fact that the National Justice Council (CNJ) determined that the courts should adopt another system the Judicial Process Electronic System (PJe) [3; 25]. As to how one can search for information, the present study showed that there are no standards in the number and type of fields available to find court cases. Two courts offer only one field, namely search text, while there are courts that provide up to 20 fields. The same applies to the search results: there are no standards in what is displayed as result, and the number and type of attributes vary widely, as it can be seen in Figure 2.  
Figure 1: Distribution of jurisprudential search engines regarding how they were developed. That difference between court data available and search parameters carries significant impact on any research that involves a nationwide view of a comparison between Courts, as the search methodology may not be available or the desired attribute may not be in the result data. This finding corroborates with a report from Artigo 19 Artigo (1998), which strongly advocates for standards in the jurisprudence search engines, as they see it as fundamental for judicial transparency. In relation to the use of CAPTCHA (Figure 3), which hinders the information requests that are made by a machine, it was found that of the 29 surveyed, nine courts use it, and six of the courts that use e-SAJ force the user to go through the challenge before have effective access to the content of decisions. Finally, with respect to access and download of the full text of the decisions, the courts of Justice of Espirito Santo and Goias do not have this feature in their search engines. Another four courts, namely Para, Pernambuco, Rio de Janeiro (both systems), and Tocantins have the feature in their web-system, but the feature does not work, which for practical terms is no different than the former. This is not in compliance with the second article of resolution 121/2010-CNJ ([PERSON], 2010), which ensures, to any person, the right to access to procedural information and the basic data of the processes, such as the number, class and process issues, name of the parties, and their lawyers, procedural timelines in lawsuits, and full text of the decisions, sentences, rulings, and votes, all of which should be available at any time.