Control of legal processes using collaborative tools

Martín Santos Domínguez, Isaac Alberto Parra Ramírez, Salvador Rodríguez Camacho

and Hiriam Eduardo Pérez Vidal

Instituto de Investigaciones Eléctricas Gerencia de Sistema Informáticos

Tel. +55 (777) 362 3811 Cuernavaca, Morelos

México msantos@iie.org.mx, iaparra@iie.org.mx, srodrigu@iie.org.mx, and heperez@iie.org.mx

Abstract

The aim of this paper is discuss the current limitations of the information systems used in legal processes, it is described the architecture of a control and tracking system of juridical matters that it was integrated with collaborative tools. This application has contributed to implement a more transparent and documented administration process of the juridical matters in the public electric companies in Mexico. This system allows lawyers to register the actions carried out; it generates supervision reports and notifications to review the actions and support to make correct decisions. Finally, we review the desirable characteristics to improve it and those required to exploit the information stored as best practices and learned lessons. Keywords: Collaboration tools, legal processes and workflow.

1. Introduction Traditionally, the areas related with juridical matters don't have information systems to control and track the actions that the lawyers carry out on the legal cases assigned to them. Usually, the juridical files are administered by the lawyers in their personal computers. The actions that are carried out in the legal exercise are integrated in several separate documents, which are not related and are rarely shared. The computer systems of documental administration allow the classification and reception of documents. However, the actions accomplished in each juridical matter can affect the final result of a trial; each action can change the result in a tribunal. The knowledge of how each action influence the result of a trial is documented in different ways or it is lost. In many cases, the legal

matters should be reviewed by several lawyers, different tasks should be assigned to others persons or the matters should be reassigned to other lawyers. In most of the cases this originates the following consequences:

• Lawyers do not have control over the legal matters assigned to them.

• Lawyers ignore the legal matters that they should attend.

• Legal matters are not appropriately administered.

• Cases are lost for inattention. • Information is lost on the carried out actions. • The experience acquired in the practice remains

as implicit knowledge (in lawyers head). • Unnecessary repetition of tasks.

Additionally, the administrators and the key personnel of these areas have to work additional hours to generate reports that indicate different metric such as: the state of the legal matters, as well as the hours, expenses, actions carried out by the lawyers, their next actions, the current state of the legal matters, results, recovered cash, etc. All these characteristics are essential for a health management of legal matters without losing the confidentiality and security of the information [1]. At the present, the software available for the legal exercise is administrative or it is oriented to a personal use, without considering aspects such as: the communication between teams of work, the possibility to delegate tasks and to keep references of the actions carried out. The lawyer ends up making use of several computer systems to accomplish his work, such as: their personal agenda, private documents, contacts, documental administration system, etc. The information systems have evolved in systems that incorporate workflows and collaborative spaces allow the

users to exchange information, to validate and complete tasks that are carried out additionally to the capture of the data. The system described next was developed with the objective of integrating a collaborative tool that allows the lawyers, to give tracking and to control the juridical matters, to perform tasks, to register results, to consult planned tasks, calendar, lists of contacts, etc. in a single place. At the same time, to go building a registration of knowledge of the state of the juridical practice (cases of success) that allow sharing in an explicit way the knowledge and acquired experiences.

2. Collaboration tools Currently, the technologies of information have increased the speed with which the businesses are administered. The organizations that don't adapt to this rhythm of changes won't survive. To achieve these changes, the organizations should have tools of collaboration that act as digital nervous systems [2]. Like a human nervous system, the computer system should accomplish similar functions, to transfer information inside the organization to who needs it and in the appropriate moment. The collaborative workspaces are more suitable to the process in that the information is administered by the users [3]. The legal processes require that in each stage was indicated the state of the matters, to give warning of the next actions, to give warning of the change of results in trials by the taken actions, etc. Due to the complexity and diversity of the juridical matters, the development of an appropriate computer model for the legal processes becomes very complex. In a relational model of the legal processes should be considered the desnormalization of the data, because the information generated in each matter should be conserved without alterations [4]. The documental model developed by IBM Lotus allows the integration of workflows generating an architecture more flexible and compatible with the requirements of maintaining, the information in one piece, as well as a better form of implementing a model of the work processes for legal matters to provide tracking and control to the actions taken by means of the use of agents [5].

2.1 Workflow elements A workflow is composed of three main elements (see fig. 1):

• Business rules. • Objects of information • Actors.

The business rules establish the mode in that the information flows. That is, they indicate the activities to make and who carry out them. The objects of information are documents that contain the information that is

evaluated and revised in the process. This represents the knowledge of the business. The actors are people or groups that get involved directly in the activities according to the process definition. They build the content, they make decisions, they delegate activities and they supervise the work. The functions to realize by the actor are defined by his role in the organizational structure.

Fig. 1 Workflow elements

2.2 Key benefits of workflows The main benefits that are obtained with the workflows are [6]: Improved efficiency: The automation of the business processes allows the elimination of many unnecessary steps. Better control of the process: The improvement of the business process administration is achieved through the standardization of the work methods and the definition of routes. Service oriented to the client: The consistencies in the processes give a bigger control in the answer levels to the clients. Flexibility: The control software on the processes allows manage the changes of the necessities of the business. Improvement of the business process: The focus on the business processes permits its narrowing and simplification.

2.3 Communication In a workflow, the communication on the processes state is basic. The communication in a work team can be synchronous or asynchronous.

The synchronous communication allows the capacity to contact people in the necessary instant. Examples of this are the services of instantaneous messaging, the videoconference services, etc. The asynchronous communication allows to send information to the people without necessity them to be in its workplace. A common example is the electronic mail service.

3. Developed system description The control and tracking system of juridical matters was development using workflows and collaboration spaces. This application was developed with the purpose of improvement the process of the legal matters, trials and procedures that the lawyers of the public electric companies in Mexico carry out (Federal Commission of Electricity and Light and Force of the Center).

3.1 Architecture The system was divided in two principal components (see fig. 2). The first one implements the workflows and the collaboration spaces. The second one extracts management information and improvement indicators of the process:

• The components of collaboration and workflows were developed using the platform IBM Lotus Domino Server.

• For the extraction and generation of statistical information was used the Seagate Crystal Report tool.

Fig. 2 components of the system

3.2 Principal workflow Due to the diverse nature of the juridical matters, it was necessary to define a flow of tracking and control that it allowed to generate the different states of the cases in a single process, as well as, to define the main tasks to carry out without considering the nature of the legal matter (see fig. 3). In this model was considered the

capacity of growth and addition of new legal matters to administer. In the different stages of the process the following tasks were defined as follows:

• Registering juridical matters. • Assigning the legal matter to an area. • Assigning the lawyer that will take the case. • Attaching information related to the case. • Registering actions. • Registering concluded actions. • Notifying events of the legal matter. • Registering a concluded juridical matter • Planning commitments or tasks.

Fig. 3 workflow of the legal matters The stages establish the condition and the progress of a legal matter. When the dates of the programmed actions of the subjects are near or surpassed, automatic notifications are generated to take correctives actions.

3.3 Information objects IISDomino Server The documental objects of the system are mainly two (see fig. 4): Reports

jurismatica.nsf • Legal matters. • Actions.

Other support elements provide information to the users on the condition of their actions, like the notifications generated automatically by agents or the commitments registered in the personal calendar of the lawyers. The documents of legal matters contain the essential information. This information combines the general data, description and specifics data of the given subject, its type, the state of the legal matter, the data of its conclusion, and others fields only accessible for the administrator. These fields are used by the system to control the state of the legal matters in the process.

3.5 Security

The security scheme implemented in the system uses the security provided by the Lotus Domino Server. Each user should be registered in the server to be user of the system. Once the user is authenticated, the server validates his roles assigned and it allows or it restricts to him the access to the application and his modules depending on the rights that it possesses in the access control list.

The information that is created always contains the user's name that generates it or publishes it. The access to each object of information is exclusive for each work team. The system also incorporates an access for supervision based on the hierarchical levels of the organization.

Fig. 4 elements of information

3.6 Communication The actions are documents that describe the lawyer's events during the development of the case and they are bound to the legal matter. These actions are knowledge sources for the organization.

The system uses a schema based in asynchronous communication to send e-mail messages to the lawyers for the tracking of the legal matters and to their supervisors. These messages are generated by the activities carry out in the workflow.

The legal matters integrated in the system are classified according to their type: civil, penal, mercantile, labor, administrative, human rights, agrarian and others.

Other messages are sent by the system in an automatic mode when the programmed dates expire or the planned actions have not concluded. These messages are generated by resident agents in the Server.

3.4 Organizational structure 3.7 Present conditions of operation

The hierarchy of positions inside of the company determines the tasks that each user can make. The reach and quantity of tasks that each user of the system can perform are determined by their roles or functions. Each role has access to a module different from the system (see fig. 5). The activities are restricted by module. The relationship between the roles and the modules of the system is the following one:

At the moment, the system is operating in the two public electric companies of Mexico. The system has modules defined by role as follows:

• Supervision level. • Head of administrative unit. • Head of area.

• Head of department. • Lawyer. • Secretary. • Administrator.

• Search level. • Report module.

Actually, the system is used by almost 500 users, it is installed in 40 geographical places distributed in the Mexican Republic, it contains near of 30,000 registered legal matters, it stores more of 58,000 documents and it generates 60 statistical reports. 4. Future work Fig. 5 roles vs. modules In the next version of the application, the following characteristics will be integrated:

• The application will be accessed only by web using a portal.

• Several juridical services will be integrated such as: digital libraries, juridical archive, discussion forums, on-line professional, directory of specialists, search engine, etc.

These characteristics will give the capacity to the users of consulting the information in any point of the Internet, using mobile or wireless networks. The concluded juridical matters will be transferred to a repository of historical data. The repository generated will be transformed by a classification module in best practices and learned lessons. These documents could be searched by the users to consult them. The searches allow identifying the sources of information, as well as to the authors of the same ones. This module will allow incorporating the knowledge management to the legal exercise. The participants of the workflow will have the capacity to identify similar cases or to make contact with the specialist in the topic using an asynchronous schema such as the e-mail, or synchronous incorporating the technologies of on-line communication as the instant messaging or videoconference. Will be incorporated methods of multidimensional analysis of data, to generate the metrics of the process.

5. Conclusions The system has been adopted by the public companies of the electric sector in Mexico and it has generated important results such as: improvements in the tracking of the legal matters, transparency in its management, tracking of the statistical metrics. The strategic information will allow to the new lawyers reducing his time to learn about of the legal exercise used in the electrical sector. The experience acquired in this development has allowed us to change the focus of development of traditional computer systems to systems based on collaboration spaces. A new generation of developments will allow incorporating analysis services, discussion and notifications improving the practice of the legal systems.

6. References [1] Isaac Parra, Salvador Rodríguez, Hiriam Pérez, "Manual de Diseño - Jurismática", Instituto de Investigaciones Eléctricas 2001, Mexico [2] Bill Gates, “Business @ The Speed of Thought” Microsoft Press 1999, USA. [3] Bryan S. Coffman and James B. Smethurst, “Principals Seven Basic Concepts of Design for Creating Collaborative Spaces”. Sente Corporation 1999, USA.

[4] White Paper, "Automating Real-World Business Process", Lotus Development Corporation, 1999, USA. [5] Søren Peter Nielsen, Carol Easthope, Pieter Gosselink, Karl Gutsze, Janno Gnaws him, "Using Dominates Workflow", IBM Corporation, International Technical Support Organization, 2000, USA. [6] Workflow Management Coalition, "Terminology & Glossary", 1999, United Kingdom.