Abstract
Since 2000, Trial OnLine (TOL) is a typical nationwide e-filing project aiming at managing, in a comprehensive way, documents and communications of all civil trial proceedings through digital solutions. Even though it was expected that in 2005 more than 50 courts would have taken advantage of TOL’s applications, at the end of 2006 only one application (payment order) was in use and only in one court: the Tribunal of Milan. Now the situation is changed and some other online civil proceedings are progressively spreading. In this chapter, the reasons behind this deep change are investigated. The understanding of the great complexity of legal, technological, organizational, and institutional domains involved in TOL project development has been the goal of our analysis. The simplification of the technological architecture, the modification of the legal framework for promoting legally viable ICT-based practices, and, above all, a close collaboration between courts and bar associations in facilitating user access to e-justice are considered the main factors for the revitalization of TOL when project failure was around the corner.
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Notes
- 1.
The word ‘trial’ is the conventional name given to the project even if the right word to be used is ‘proceeding’.
- 2.
A Document Type Definition (DTD) is a set of mark-up statements that define a document type for a language (SGML-family), such as SGML, XML and HTML. A DTD provides a formal syntax that states precisely which components and positions can appear in the document, and how the elements’ contents, attributes and entities may be used (source Wikipedia).
- 3.
The ‘certified email’ (CEM now on) is an email address given by a specific certification authority after a process of registration and validation.
- 4.
The system operated in this way. During the night, the databases of the court were replicated in batch mode on the PolisWeb server. The PolisWeb was placed on a so-called DMZ network (it means De-Militarized Zone in informatics) to preserve the LAN of the court from outside, protecting a piece of it. Once registered with the court, the user receives an ID and password to enable the service for the kiosks located inside the court. Otherwise, if the request for access came from a remote location, it was necessary for the user to acquire a piece of software to allow ‘traceability’ of the computer that was connecting and for the encryption of data exchange.
- 5.
Standards definitions are available at www.w3.org/Style/XSL/www.w3.org/TR/2001/REC-xsl-20011015 and www.w3.org/TR/xslt
- 6.
The Judges’ Console is an evolution of the ‘old’ POLIS briefly introduced in Sect. 7.3.
- 7.
About 84 % of the total investments in ICT projects in the civil sector (Fabri 2009).
- 8.
Source: Ministero della Giustizia (www.processotelematico.giustizia.it/pdapublic/index.jsp)
- 9.
Data from http://www.processotelematico.it. The information includes data for enforcement and insolvency proceedings not considered by this study.
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Carnevali, D., Resca, A. (2014). Pushing at the Edge of Maximum Manageable Complexity: The Case of ‘Trial Online’ in Italy. In: Contini, F., Lanzara, G. (eds) The Circulation of Agency in E-Justice. Law, Governance and Technology Series, vol 13. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-7525-1_7
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