3 Future Directions 32 comes in mediation as compared to courts, allowing them to decide the most appropriate mechanism to resolve their dispute (Sadka, Seira, and Woodruff, 2017). In terms of data-driven innovations, the Chilean example of Conecta—a platform developed during the COVID-19 pandemic to provide citizens with greater access to courts via WhatsApp—is just one among many which illustrates the potent capacity of data and creativity to facilitate electronic justice. Data integration helps bring together the documents and history of a case via the ease of sending a WhatsApp message. A comprehensive data infrastructure also introduces the ability to build chatbots that improve institutional capacity to respond to citizens’ queries and demands. This is just one example, in addition to many others—such as e-arbitration or electronic hearings—where data can bring justice closer to citizens and improve the effectiveness of the legal system while enhancing people’s trust in institutions.

Second, the data revolution may improve court performance. Data has the promise of improving the efficiency, fairness, and effectiveness of justice systems. It may be used to identify the main bottlenecks of courts, i.e., the reasons why cases get backlogged or why adjournments take place. Data systems have the potential to facilitate a better deployment of resources by diagnosing and forecasting future needs in courts and litigants’ needs. In addition to providing diagnoses, there are data-driven solutions that may improve court performance. An example is dashboard management tools and nudges to court actors. These apps allow for a wide range of options: from providing personalized feedback on best and worst-performing metrics, to motivating better performance via behavioral nudges Cooke et al. (2018). These applications can be enhanced by bringing AI to act as a support tool for court actors. AI can help predict future congestion in courts, of particular importance due to the pandemic’s effect on adjournments; detect early cases at high risk of gender-based violence; or potentially help predict recidivism (Kleinberg et al., 2018). These innovations may come with risks and trade-offs that need to be evaluated and calibrated, yet the promise of the applications make them worthy of a proper assessment. Finally, data may also be used to identify and address judicial biases and inconsistencies, including gender and racial discrimination or snap judgments, among others. We have presented in this paper an 8-step approach by which data integration may help identify such biases.

Third, the data revolution may be used to create better knowledge within and across justice systems. Data has the promise to improve the quality and accessibility of judicial decisions, and promote best practices among legal actors. As a diagnostic tool, data may help evaluate the text of judicial decisions, identify inconsistencies in writings, and create tools for better training of judges. Specific innovations may include, for example, legal search engines that allow judges and court actors to find cases with similar fact patterns or legal citations, thus speeding up the process–and ideally the quality–of legal decisions. This data may also be used to train judges based on the history of their past decisions in comparison to their peers. In addition, data may not only help legal actors develop a knowledge base for their own decisions, but may also help to create and share knowledge across peers. For example, the sharing of advice in a systematic manner across mediators or judges may create a set of best practices that others in the profession can use to improve the quality and efficiency of their services. This knowledge can scale up beyond cases in a country, and actually refer to laws across countries. The data revolution may bring the possibility to identify best legal practices or "missing laws" in any specific country by developing an empirically-based method to analyze and compare existing regulations to enhance a country’s legal system.

Overall, by collecting data, measuring indicators, evaluating performance and testing innovations, judiciaries around the world can improve the efficiency, access to and quality of justice. Data systems and technological innovations bring the opportunity to improve the functioning of justice systems while also evaluating the impact of justice reforms. Such opportunities should not be overlooked, particularly in developing countries, given the crucial role that justice and legal institutions play in people’s lives and the prosperity of nations.