
Ever wanted to programmatically file a lawsuit? In Poland, you can. - nathell
http://blog.danieljanus.pl/ever-wanted-to-programmatically-file-a-lawsui
======
sdfjkl
Excellent, soon computer-controlled companies can automatically sue each
other.

 _"The president of agalmic.holdings.root.184.97.AB5 is
agalmic.holdings.root.184.97.201. The secretary is
agalmic.holdings.root.184.D5, and the chair is
agalmic.holdings.root.184.E8.FF. All the shares are owned by those companies
in equal measure, and I can tell you that their regulations are written in
Python. Have a nice day, now!"_ ([http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-
static/fiction/accelera...](http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-
static/fiction/accelerando/accelerando.html))

~~~
huxley
It's almost as if Douglas Adams had written Dickens' Bleak House.

------
ajuc
This court is in my city, I even worked for a while with people that manage
the system :)

This is only for very repetative cases about debt collection enforcement -
courts were overwhelmed by these before, and now this specialised court
handles them.

------
kijin
Import this into the USA, and the RIAA/MPAA will integrate the API into their
torrent detection tools before you can say dmca. Then there will be an
automated interface to subpoena ISPs for subscriber information (GET
/subscriber/info?ip=123.45.67.89&time=1234567890&judge_signature=b76c8a23),
and the only thing missing will be an automated interface for customers to be
notified, view, and quash subpoenas for their information. The last one is
crucial when the lawsuit is being filed thousands of miles away, but I doubt
that the MAFIAA will allow that to happen.

------
magicseth
This short piece of fiction seemed so far off before. Now it seems closer:
<http://www.ftrain.com/nanolaw.html>

~~~
pavel_lishin
Dang, I've been mistakenly attributing this to Stross in my head this whole
time.

~~~
AkThhhpppt
Not mistakenly: it's in Accelerando - see the first comment.

------
rauljara
Once lawsuits can be filed by algorithm, any court system would be completely
overwhelmed unless it had a) some system for limiting the number of lawsuits
and/or b) some system for settling lawsuits that would involve an algorithm.

Some system for limiting the number of lawsuits could be as simple as charging
filing fees. Ones that scale in proportion to the number of lawsuits you file
would be ideal (first case: free; 1,000th case: 10 million euros).

Some system for settling lawsuits sounds scary, but I actually kind like the
idea of an algorithm that checks the number of lawsuits you have filed, and
automatically returns a case dismissal if it is above a certain threshold. I'm
sure there are some grave implications for having such a cavalier approach to
dismissing lawsuits, but for some reason none are occurring to me at the
moment.

~~~
pavel_lishin
_Some system for limiting the number of lawsuits could be as simple as
charging filing fees._

It seems that there is already a fee:

 _To give you an example, the FileLawsuits method returns a structure that
consists of, inter alia, the amount of court fee to pay, the value of the
matter of dispute (both broken down into individual lawsuits), and a status
code with a description._

I assume that you can't actually settle the suit programmatically, though -
otherwise, you could probably gamble on winning some percentage of lawsuits in
order to pay for the fees of the losing ones.

Stock markets are so 2000's.

(As an aside, can we please get some sort of sane mechanism for quoting text?)

~~~
ars
> (As an aside, can we please get some sort of sane mechanism for quoting
> text?)

I've always done it like email.

Or you can be a journalist, and put quote marks around what you are quoting.

~~~
pavel_lishin
That gets messy for multi-line quotations, and paragraphs. :(

------
gpcz
Given the precedent of the DocX foreclosure signature fraud, the DirecTV smart
card lawsuits, and the RIAA lawsuits, I think bulk lawsuits are a ripe
territory for a combination of fraud and lawsuits with poorly thought-out
evidence that only win because settling is cheaper. With the current system,
there is an assumption that a human at least looked over the lawsuit before
filing, but if programmatic lawsuits are made possible, we may see the first
lawsuit that literally was not thought out at all before filing. In this case,
I think it's best to retain a human element to the filing process, much like
we have dead man's switches on trains.

------
mseebach
This is "payments claims court" - presumably it's a fairly deterministic
bureaucratic process that's required to go through to deal with debtors in
default, perhaps before you can start chasing them properly.

~~~
nathell
That's correct. Combined with a high barrier of entry (you need to create an
account of the appropriate type AND pay a fee -- 1,25% of the value of the
matter of dispute -- for the case to be processed) this is what makes it
viable in the first place.

~~~
thatnewguy
Yup, that fees quickly add up. I work for a company which builds interfaces
between clients' systems and e-court
([http://www.infisolus.pl/oferta/elektroniczne-postepowanie-
up...](http://www.infisolus.pl/oferta/elektroniczne-postepowanie-upominawcze-
esad/) \- sorry, polish only) and I can attest that they couldn't actually
"spam" e-court with lawsuits - their budgets for this part of collections
process traditionally are not so big.

------
laacz
This actually looks like - let's build an api "because we can". Not "because
it's reasonable". I presume, that process of suing still requires some kind of
human approval and post-processing. An idea of e-court is great, if restricted
to small and simple claims, though.

Edit: I am astonished by these numbers. I don't believe that this is court per
se. Can somebody elaborate? 1.6 million issued payment orders is huge number
even for Poland :)

 _The adjudicating personnel of the e-court comprises four judges and 96 court
officials (referendarze-officials adjudicating independently in certain
categories of cases) who are supported by 70 clerks. As of October the 1st
2011, 2 000 000 lawsuits have been lodged in the e-court, and in some 1 600
000 cases payment orders have been issued._

~~~
ideaoverload
API serves as a way to file lawsuit. It is humans who process them. This court
deals with standard claims like businesses not paying for the service/goods
but also consumers not paying their bills.

API is useful for companies like mobile operators or utility providers who
have thousands of subscribers who do not pay.

1.6M payment orders, 21 months, 200 staff = ~17 cases per day per person (no
holidays and vacations). Sounds doable given it is likely to be batches of
claims as described above.

------
viraptor
I have mixed feelings about this: "The methods include FileLawsuits,
FileComplaints, SupplyDocuments, GetCaseHistory and so on (the actual names
are in Polish)." I'd never even think of creating an API that doesn't use
English method names (even though it's not my first language). It doesn't
matter whether this is used only internally at the moment. At some point
you'll need to integrate with others in one way or another.

Then again... it was created for Polish people and it probably contains some
law-related vocabulary which not everyone will be familiar with if it's
translated.

But if they ever make it stable enough to license the system to other
countries, it would be a hard thing to change. Can't decide what I think of
this idea.

~~~
zalew
I'm Polish and I have worked on a project with a very specific locally
oriented domain (politics and administration) a few years ago, and I must say
that we tried to do it in English and abandoned the idea after a few hours
during the design phase. It was just counter-intuitive to translate every
institution name and process to English, even though we all were fluent with
the language. Not all of the terminology can be translated 1:1, and we'd have
to look up not only the words, but even definitions of the respective English
term to make sure it's applicable, constantly check how various related
entities' names translate, etc. And all of this for nothing, it would be
useless abroad anyway! Huge waste of time and brain resources. We ended up
coding in Polish. One serious downside: after working on such a project for
months, you get to the next one and start coding it in Polish - ugh.

------
drostie
We should just write the laws in Prolog and call it Prolaw. Then we no longer
would have to call the web site optimization peoples by the disparaging term
"spammers" but could instead call them by the marginally less disparaging term
"lawyers," and they could command much higher salaries.

------
jakejake
Is there anything good about this? (serious question)

~~~
ajuc
Lots of adventages. The most improtant is - one small institution serves big
amount of traffic, freeing rest courts in Poland to judge regular cases. This
makes long wating time for each case shorter, and this is very important in
many cases.

It's the difference between functional law system, that people treat as one of
the options to solve problems, and dysfunctional one, where nobody bothers
suing anybody, because it will take 5 years and cost fortune.

I don't think we in Poland have good law system, because waiting time is still
too long. But it's step in the right direction.

~~~
pdemb
As far as I know, you cannot defend yourself in the same way the person or
institution attacks you. That is, if you want to respond, to defend yourself
in court, you have to fight using normal court procedures, not e-court
procedures. Proceeding in normal (pen and paper) way is more expensive than
proceeding in electronic form, though the former is the only way to cancel the
decision of e-court.

Moreover, the vast amount of cases solved by such small number of workers
suggests that processes in such e-courts are short and irrelevant. The
sentence is automaticaly set to 'guilty'.

EDIT: clarification

~~~
ajuc
Yes, but that's exactly the idea - to speed up the irrelevant obvious cases
where sued person don't even try to defen himself - there's many such cases,
and before they were solved in normal procedure, with tons of buerocracy, and
that used up judges and other workers time, making more complicated cases
longer as well.

~~~
pdemb
Sorry, but this is not the level where whole case should be solved. The court
is by definition a place where both sides speak, and e-court is a place where
only one side speaks, and she doesn't even has to prove she's right.

~~~
ajuc
[http://www.dziennikwschodni.pl/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20...](http://www.dziennikwschodni.pl/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20100622/PRZEGLADPRASY/587171411)

"Elektroniczna procedura przeznaczona jest dla tzw. spraw upominawczych, które
wytaczają głównie dostawcy masowych usług, np. zakłady energetyczne czy
operatorzy komórkowi. Chodzi w tych sprawach o należności dobrze
udokumentowane, a dłużnikami są zwykle osoby fizyczne, które zazwyczaj nie
kwestionują sądowego nakazu. Gdy nie ma odwołania, nabiera on skutku
prawomocnego wyroku."

It means e-court is for cases where there is good documentation, and persons
that were judged can appeal, but if they don't (and they usually don't), these
cases are processed automatically.

"Tylko w 4 tys. spraw e-sąd nie wydał nakazów i np. oddalił pozew, umarzając
postępowanie. Sprzeciwów złożono zaledwie 3229, a więc w nieco ponad 2 proc.
spraw. W takich sytuacjach sprawy przekazywane są do zwykłych sądów."

Only in 4 tousand cases e-court changed default decision, there were also 3229
appeals (2% of cases - this artcle is old a few months so this won't add to 2
000 000 cases). In such cases the matter is transferred to regular court.

What's wrong with that?

~~~
pdemb
Appeal should be possible in e-form too.

------
SonicSoul
yet another way to log jam the justice system

[http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/11/opinion/sunday/go-to-
trial...](http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/11/opinion/sunday/go-to-trial-crash-
the-justice-system.html)

