PegaWorld iNspire 2024: Ministry of Justice: Changing From a Document-driven Organization to a Data-driving Organization

Okay, let's let's get started. Welcome, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you, everybody, for coming to this session by the Spanish Ministry of Justice. My name is Alex Case. I'm a senior director at Pega and the government industry principal for the EMEA region. It's my brief but pleasurable job just to introduce our speakers. Um, Oscar and Lorenzo. Um, so Lorenzo de Paz de la Paz is a civil servant at the Spanish Ministry of Justice, where he's been since 2022, and he leads the area responsible for Pega low-code development, robotic process automation and quality assurance, amongst other responsibilities. And then Oscar Paloma is a civil servant also at the Spanish Ministry of Justice, as you would expect where he's been since 2020.

He leads the area responsible for a number of the Pega use cases for the communication system, with courts and for international projects, amongst other responsibilities. So thank you both very much for joining us today. Thank you. Thank you, Alex, for. Thank you, Alex, for your introduction. And thank you to to all the Pega family for inviting us to this event. It's a great opportunity to learn from from other partners and clients of Pega to learn what they are doing and try to inspire what we can and get inspired by others. So our presentation is about how we are changing from a document driven organization to a data driven organization. Um, first of all, I would like to introduce a bit our organization.

Just a few remarks. Um, the actual name of the ministry is a bit longer is the Ministry of the presidency, Justice and Parliamentary Relations. But it is a bit too long. So I'm going to say Ministry of Justice maybe a few times during my presentation. We work for the Directorate General for Digital Transformation of the Administration of Justice within this organization. By the way, I'm Oscar Palomo because we are two, and even though Alex introduced us, it was. For some some extra information about our organization. The first thing we want to say is that we are leading the digital transformation of justice. It is not because we do AI, which we do since some years, since 2021, more or less.

But it is also that we are our justice is digital. This is a journey we started some years ago. It's not that we started to digitalize our justice last year. That's why we think we are leading digital transformation of justice, both at national level and also at European level, including criminal for instance criminal. Our criminal jurisdiction is also digital, so there are no documents anymore in criminal justice. We've used the innovation and justice. We have very innovative solutions. We are, for instance, summarizing documents using AI in a simple language so citizens can understand and can have a more accessible justice. We we have the support of the political level of the ministry that that is something very important.

For instance, uh, our secretary of state was the former Secretariat general. That is very good because I don't need to explain to him the projects we are doing or the priorities. He knows very well what we do or what our priorities are, because he has been working for quite some time in the ministry. That leads also me to the next point, which is the confidence and empowerment of digital profiles. Uh, in our director general is an IT guy. That is very good, because it's not that lawyers cannot, uh, kind of deal with technology. I'm not saying that. Uh, but if you put the IT experts to lead, I think that's a good decision. And that's what our ministry minister did.

Uh, because our, uh, as I said, our director general is an IT guy that has a downside. You cannot lie to him. Of course, that that's a problem for us when something is going wrong. And finally. But but but not last but not least, we have the financial support. We have the financial support both at national level with our national budget, of course, but also with the next generation EU funds. This is very important, uh, moment for us, even though Covid, the Covid crisis was a very bad time for everyone. The recovery of the Covid in Europe, in the European Union, thanks to this next generation EU funds, is being really great. We have we are, we are imposing a lot of initiatives thanks to this next generation EU, uh, funding plan.

What does it mean to to lead an innovate to us? I just want to give you some examples. We collaborate at national level with organizations of businesses. We collaborate with the autonomous regions also because we have other communities that are providing solutions to the courts. For instance, talking about awards, we have got recently an award to our artificial intelligence initiatives. Also, we have got awards at European level to to the robotic process automation initiatives, for instance, which Lorenzo lead. Uh, also we have got the Impact Award award a couple of days ago. Thank you to Pega again. Thank you.

And we are very proud of collaborating with a lot of colleagues from European countries, both from from the European Union and also other countries from the outside of the European Union. This collaboration sometimes takes the shape of a project in consortium with other countries from the European Union, for instance, just to mention one Oeko-tex. Oeko-tex is an infrastructure we have built in Europe to exchange cross-border cases. This is very important when it comes to, uh, justice between two countries. We also collaborate with European agencies like Eu-lisa. Eu-lisa is the largest large information, large scale information systems agency. They usually were dealing with the home affairs systems, and now they are in charge of the, uh, justice systems or large scale justice systems like Oeko-tex. We, uh, as part of the European Union last semester, we we held the presidency of the Council of the European Union. It was a great opportunity for us to share the state of the art of the developments in justice.

For instance, this is a conference we organized in Madrid as part of our presidency. Um, we are also collaborating with other countries, for instance, in twinning projects with the Dominican Republic and other countries to try to promote the digitalization of justice. We collaborate also with the in similar initiatives with the Inter-American development Bank or the Asian Development Bank. These are some of the things we do and why we think we are at the forefront of of digitalization in justice. Well, I wanted to refer briefly also to one of our, uh, plans. This is the justice 2030 plan. This is a ten year plan to transform the public service of justice. It has three main pillars. The first one is the access to rights and freedoms.

This means to ensure equal access for all citizens, professionals and companies. And just to give an example for you to understand what this means, we can talk a bit about the justice folder, which is a one stop shop, uh, that we have for easing the access of citizens to, uh, citizens, professionals and enterprises, of course, to the justice services. So we are gathering our services, and we are telling the citizen what he needs to to get. We are not telling him. We are not telling them the law. Here is the law of the civil registry. Now we are giving them the direct link to the download of the Civil Registry certificate, trying to make it easier to access to justice and make it a bit more understandable for for for citizens. The second pillar of this ten year, ten year plan is the efficiency. What is the goal?

The goal is to achieve organizational, procedural and digital efficiency. And talking about digital efficiency, it's worth mentioning the Digital Efficiency Act. This is a very interesting law. I'm very sorry. It's only in Spanish for the moment, but I invite you to take a look at this law because it talks about AI, robotics and data orientation, which is all we are trying to do. We are trying to get rid of documents. Justice is very intensive in documents. We have tons of documents, massive amounts of documents, and we want to get more data orientation. That's what we are achieving.

And this law gives sense to all the initiatives we have. So it's a very inspiring law. We're we were talking about getting inspired. So I think this law can inspire other countries that are trying to to develop further their justice service. And finally, the third pillar is the sustainability and cohesion. Um, this means to connect the digital transformation of justice with the transformation of our country and also of the European Union. Just to give an example of what this means is we have created an office of the Office of Justice in the municipalities. It has nothing to do with courts. It's not that this is a kind of court in every village.

No, it's it's an office, an administrative office where you can connect to, for instance, a telematic trial. Or you can get a certificate if you don't know how to do it online. So it's a very logical and logical thing, but it's more it's very digital because it helps people to access to justice and to have a cohesion. Uh, more cohesion. Uh. Yeah. Thank you. Oscar. So I wanted to talk to you about our.

Paradigm. Shift. Well, all of you have known how they have been seen, all the government administrations before the advent of digital solutions. Paper everywhere. Tons and tons of paper everywhere. What a mess, isn't it? But it was not only a transition, but it was based on. We need to shift the strategy, the path. We saw that a managing documents between IT system is not efficiency and we encountered the following impediments low efficiency, lack of consistency, very poor statistics.

And well, we won't be able to to base our policies based on data. So we started working years ago on a strategy, on a path in order to shift from document oriented to data oriented justice. So during these years, we we have achieved many milestones. I want to mention four of them. First of all, a uh, we we defined a data manifest which contains the rules in order to, to to create and to transform a justice digital services based on data. It is public. You can scan the QR code in your mind. Uh, the the second milestone I would like to highlight a well, we define a strategy, but we need it to have a data officer in charge of this strategy. So we started in this journey and a well, we we publish and a data justice portal which all the public citizens, practitioners, companies are able to extract a consume in a in a data driving way all the justice related data.

I mean it is accessible 24 hours. It is it is public and it is. And it gives us the opportunity of of guiding the policies based on on the data. Well, now well, as I mentioned, well, obviously we we need to adjust our obligations and our policies to this cultural mindset to, to based on based on the data. Well, we can say now that we have turned the tables. We have our IT systems are higher efficiency, consistency, traceability. It's quite important. This one. Yeah.

And well we are now able to, to uh to define public policies based on data. I can mention many use cases that this chain of, of mindset is quite very important in the in the in in my area. Based on the robotic process automation, we are able to optimize the the small claims requests, which are the 50% of the work of our request civil courts, which it is incredible incredible how to see the the courts are being benefits of of of this data oriented mindsets. Well and not just words I mean we've been able to to measure all this uh, um change a a well, we can say now that, uh, we've enabled to to save, uh, from the label paper towels and show me some perspective. A for instance, the label save is more than a 100 million human hours. It is incredible to see our a our data and see that we are going in the good path. I'm pretty sure many of you are wondering how are we are doing this? This chain of of of paradigm. Well, I want to show you how it it is our way.

Well, uh, we started using a model based on gathering the it the practitioners together. And now we have our legal professionals and citizens pushing our projects. It's amazing to see in the insight how they are involved, how they are from the design phase with us, and we have changed our mindset to have a user centered mindset. It's incredible. The user satisfaction in, in, in all the projects they're involved. And we have some examples, uh, where we are able to do that. Uh, I can mention the focus groups, and these are kind of meetings that we bring the citizens to our sites and, and we show them our new release, and, and they give us a, their opinion about user experience, uh, uh, accessibility, among others, For instance, there's this folder that it was our first focus group, which it is a one stop shop that allows citizens, legal professionals and companies to access to the justice services. Our importance to the data is reflected, reflected on this annual event where all these public, private and academic affairs shares how to boost innovation within the justice and the last ones. We open the justice for new ideas.

We are open to to hear the companies we are open to hear the citizens associations which are the best ideas to implement in our justice and the forum of of digital transformation. Justice that it is annual gave us this opportunity. So Oscar, go ahead. Thank you Lorenzo. So now we would like to talk a bit about our about our Pega use cases. This is, I guess, the most desired part of the presentation. Um, the first use case is the electronic service for micro enterprises. We built this system to to cover the starting and also the steps of the judicial proceeding for, uh, the small enterprises that go to bankruptcy. So it's a very important use case because it's meant for small companies that have less than ten workers, uh, more or less, which is a big share of the companies in Spain.

And, um, we had a lot of pressure to start with this system. It took us up to only four. We only had four months between the approval of the law and the moment where we needed to be live with the system. Um, but it has reduced significantly the, um, resolution times. We can we have seen how they are going from years to to weeks now the resolution times now the system it is integrated with more than 20 external services. We have made quite a good progress in the last 18 months. And just to have an idea of the figures the system handles has handled more than 3000 judicial proceedings and it has, uh, handled more than 10,000 forms. And just to have an idea of the magnitude, another figure I can mention is the assets. For instance, the assets registered in the system account for more than €250 million.

So in the end, the goal of the system is to achieve a more efficient and agile judicial proceeding to for those companies that are in a difficult economic, economic situation. So the rationale behind this is the faster the judicial proceeding is, the faster they are going to get the money back, the creditors and also the debtors for sure. So, um, the system consists, uh, basically this is, as the law says, that it has to it has to be, uh, forms. I mean, there is no free form documents anymore. So typically the lawyer has its own template. If you talk to another lawyer, it has another different template. So in this case you can see on the screen there there are 31, uh, normalized forms, standardized forms. In this case this is the starting form for the the form to start the proceeding. And we have put a lot of effort on the user experience so that they can fill up the information, uh, step by step.

First, the data about the lawyers and representatives, then later on, the economic information, as you can see on the screen and also the information about the assets, because the ultimate goal of this initiative is to have an auction portal, which we are working on. Uh, it's already in production, but it's only for advertising assets and to sell them as quickly as possible. Once the professionals, like the lawyers, submit the forms, they get to the dispatching authority. And again, it's everything oriented to date. As you as you can see on the screen, there is there is no free, uh, text boxes or something similar to that. I mean, uh, it's everything oriented to data, in this case the dispatching authority. It's let's say this is a step prior to to to the court since the, the the form to the competent court. And finally the court gets the, the the forms and the the judicial proceeding is actually started. And this thanks to thanks to this new approach, data oriented approach, and thanks to the orientation to case management of Pega, what we have achieved, it's a lot of automation.

We have reduced significantly the manual work. And for instance, all users are granted access automatically. So once adapter let's think about the bakery around the corner. Once that guy has registered or better to say the lawyer of that guy has registered the proceeding in the system. Um, the all all the and he has registered the creditors. He has all of them get access automatically to the system. That reduces significantly the amount of work that is needed in the in the court, of course. But we have more initiatives in Pega. I say coming soon, but this is already outdated because we have already a new system in production in a couple of months ago, which is the system for the selection of legal experts by by courts.

The typically the courts in Spain used to have their own lists, lists that were based on Excel spreadsheets or things like that. Not very data oriented, I must say, and it was very difficult to have to extract data. I was not transparent because every court had almost every court had their own lists. And now we have a system, a registry that is fully data oriented. You can see the area of expertise of each expert. You can see how many times they have been participating in judicial proceedings. Again, we are oriented to to data and another ecosystem in this case that we are building. This is not in. This is something we are working on now is the dispute resolution ecosystem.

We say online dispute resolution but well it actually can cover any any type of dispute resolution. It can be face to face. So we are building several pieces in Pega. The first one is the interoperability point for dispute resolution attempts. It is going to become mandatory in some time. Apparently, if the Parliament says that there is a proposal to make it mandatory to, uh, to go to mediation, for instance, before the cases get to court, that that is a way a very, uh, important measure to to avoid that many cases reach the court, especially cases, for instance, in civil jurisdiction, which typically are not that difficult to to solve. Uh, so first thing you need to do is you need to know how many resolution attempts, uh, of the conflict we have. And that's the piece, the first piece we are building. We are also working on the on a management application of the intra judicial mediation, which we are going to extend later on to the extra judicial mediation.

For instance, a citizen that wants to start, uh, wants to resolve a conflict that has with a neighbor, let's say the third piece, it could be a chatbot to advise on the most appropriate means for, uh, or for for resolving the problem, uh, in plain language. So, so you can explain to to to the machine. I have this problem with my neighbor. I want to solve it. What what is the most appropriate mean that you think I should choose. And finally we want to take the opportunity also to start testing the CRM capability capabilities, the customer relationship management capabilities with the, uh, with this ecosystem of solutions. we have quantified, uh, some time ago, what the impact of this, uh, um, ecosystem of mediation and other alternative methods could suppose and we have estimated an allocation of reallocation of resources near to 400 million in the Spanish justice. And this is this is what we call efficiency, quantified efficiency. Well, we've obtained many and many benefits of Pega.

Well, Pega has been a revolutionary technology in the Ministry of Justice of Spain. It has been it has brought us an improvement of of the development life cycle as, as we've been able to to deliver new versions of applications in the past. Uh, we just, uh, deliver one versions per year. And now we are able to to deliver a new versions just in a month. It's impressive how how we are doing the things. How? Two weeks per week. The electronic service of Microenterprise are able to to deliver value to our business. Uh, thanks to the case management platform of Pega, we've been able to to create new processes faster than with traditional technologies.

It's amazing. We are reducing the human intervention on the. On this project we are able to reduce the resolutions times. Oscar has just mentioned how the the judicial procedures are being reduced on time. Thanks to to this new solution, we are speeding and reducing the time to market. It is one of. It is part of this of our a organizational strategy and to reduce the time to market and Pega has helped us to achieve this incredible and numbers and uh, we. Are. We are increasing the user satisfaction that it is our best, um, ideas.

When we started working on this strategy and and Pega has been, uh, has gone from a supplier, just a supplier to being part of the organizational strategy. Uh, well, with traditional technologies will be able to to reach what, uh, what we've achieved together and, and, and it's now part of the organizational strategy. Uh, this this amazing technology. Well, uh, during this past, uh, well, around 30 minutes, uh, we've just discussed about how our how we are dealing the digital transformation on national and European level. A the Spanish Ministry of Justice have faced the change with a fear. And well, we have emerged and we do not fear change. Well, it's curious as we have partners from our ministry that when we started this strategy and using Pega, they told us that that we were crazy. But, um, well, once they've seen what what we can build, what we've built together, uh, they have changed their minds, obviously. Obviously.

But this journey doesn't end there. Now we are on an unstoppable process. A Pega on the Ministry of Justice of Spain are together on this. We are pushing forward. We want to be on the first line a. Well. I'm pretty sure many of you are wondering whether we are using AI or not. Sure, but well, we have some AI experience. Oscar has just talked about AI minutes ago, how we have our own AI models since 2021 and we are not.

We don't have a the we are we are not a well we are trying to use a in the future the our AI and the AI in order to build new use cases and a well, I just mentioned about the CRM capabilities that we are going to include. I'm pretty sure the the AI is going. To be. Part of the of this next year, but we are working on, on the same direction Pega and the Spanish Ministry of Justice and and we are and we are doing a good, good job. Yeah. And we share a the same premise. Justice is either judicial or it won't be justice. Thank you very. Much.

For that. Thank you. Since we have 15 more minutes for questions. So we're happy to take any questions you may have or discussions reflections. Yeah. Over there. So the only thing is that if you can use the microphone that we have been told that as this is going to be or this is being recorded, is for the people that watch it afterwards. Thank you. Hi.

Uh, in your presentation, you have, uh, mentioned about the documents. Data entry has been totally driven screen wise. The users are getting input. Are you also processing any scanned documents , any OCR? Do you do all those things for digitization in this project? If we are processing what. The OCR, optical character recognition, um, any PDF scanned PDFs where you're converting that into digital or just purely data entry? That's a very good question. Thank you.

Um, we are dealing with massive amounts of documents. Sorry. Uh, as we have said, and it's very difficult to to get rid of the documents. Actually, you cannot get rid of the documents. There are judicial proceedings, for instance, going on for years. So what we are doing now is we are developing, for instance, our our own GenAI technologies to get the content of the documents and to talk to them in such a way that you can say, for instance, let's say you are a judge and you want to know where someone mentioned a knife that was used to commit a crime, for instance. So you can you are going to be able to ask a suggestion to the documents and say in the case management system, please let me know what were the we we talk about? Or these knife was mentioned in the judicial proceeding and it's going to take you to that document. This is not in production but it's near to be in production.

Okay. And we are doing OCR in the documents that are, uh, PDF to get the content we are using. Not only I, of course, we only also the recognition of characters. We are also dealing with some other big projects, uh, related related to OCR. Uh, like like the civil registry certificates. Our civil registry is now fully digital, so it's fully oriented to data. But of course you have still the old birth certificates, marriage certificates. And we are scanning all of them and getting data from them. Um, uh, that's another big project that we have related to to to this topic is not exactly about documents, but we are only also processing videos.

The recordings of the, uh, of the all sessions in the court are recorded. And what we are doing is to convert the transform the audio to text, to make the speech to text conversion, and again to talk to the video. So we have this, uh, to talk to documents. And we are we have been working for a long time in the talk to videos. Also we can we get the subtitles, let's say from the video, from the recording and that's already working since 2017, more or less. So you are in which version 23 or 24, which. Those are not Pega based use cases? Uh, they are different technologies. But if you have interest in knowing a bit more, maybe we can exchange our contact, maybe later, and we can talk about this later .

But they are not based on Pega. But as Lorenzo said, I mean, we would be happy to test the AI capabilities of Pega, but we have been not using Pega for this. But we are trying to to use AI in the future to cover what what we don't have. I mean, all I mean, our our technology, our AI models are not perfect. And I'm pretty sure we're going to go over and use a mixed model, uh, to, to have the, the, the certainty of of of of the success. Yeah. I had a few other questions, but I was interested more towards how did you do these things in Pega like where you're storing how you're accessing all those things, but it looks like now purely in Pega only the screen has developed and data is getting captured and stored. That's the implementation currently you have now, right? Yeah.

I mean, all these scanned documents, all these things are not part of Pega project. No, no, these initiatives are different. They are not part of Pega. In this case, what we are doing with Pega is, um, and as we start, we are talking about new proceedings, new judicial proceedings. They are fully oriented to data from the beginning. So this electronic service for Microenterprises we were talking about before, it's fully oriented to data since the beginning. So that that's the reason why we are not dealing with documents. I mean, there are some documents, some let's say complementary documents. But the main thing is the forms.

So, for instance, if we talk about documents, we have, uh, the pictures of the assets, for instance, there there is a specific section in this form to upload the pictures of the assets. Uh, there you can maybe upload, let's say, another document that may complement the information of the, of the forms, but it's mainly oriented to data. That's why here in this particular initiative, we are not dealing with with documents. Okay, there are no more questions. Anyway, we are happy to exchange views after this presentation or in a later moment. If you want to know a bit more about any of the of the initiatives, thank you very much for your attention very much.