People have entered an era of profound transformation in the current post-globalization period. With the freedom to express thought and movement of ideas as intense as the freedom of movement of goods, or even greater, mankind has shocked cultures, religions, lifestyles and different ways of thinking in an intensity never seen before.

Creating, sharing, and disseminating thoughts has become so easy and scalable, and the speed that collective rationality evolves is so intense that it becomes difficult for parts of those societies to follow along the same concept. Societies evolve in a more sectorized and segmented way, making civil society more complex, more instantaneous and more tense.

Sometimes a Brazilian and a Chinese have more in common than two Brazilians between each other. Not only one world culture, but countless world cultures are been created, with identity in music, arts, literature, habits, work and hobbies shared in several parts of the world, but strange to the neighbors of the same neighborhood. With so many different ways of relations and life styles, the tension between people increases: differences and misunderstandings arise.

The daily life of people has diversified, the reality has become multipolarized. Each individual is part of many social groups and establishes more superficial ties and relations, however, in much greater quantity than in the past. Old links and new links remain with subtle digital contacts. Non-face-to-face companies dynamize human relationships and make moments of pleasure and displeasure more constant, making life more intense and more conflicting.

This new social dynamic requires a new conceptualization of what is Justice (a brighter concept than giving each one what is his propriety by right) and how the State must prepare to be present at this moment and present the decision of the judge, delivering one of the its main services, the jurisdictional provision. The solution of individual and collective conflicts occurs in a totally different proportion from what occurred when the precepts of justice and the judicial decision process were established.

Nowadays, the State has not responded or created the mechanisms it needs to provide this service, but it has clearly realized that it needs to change, especially with regard to the Judiciary.

The Digital Transformation has become a need to keep Justice existing

It is not the State and the Judiciary today that solve most of the conflicts, both in the field of Civil Law (consumer, family, contracts, banking, business, labor) or Criminal, but unfair social mechanisms of resolutions that disrespects the law, sometimes with solutions outside the law. Even with the emergence of “Parallel States” in the spot left by the State.

This reality is the crucial point that has led society today to a significant increase of the violence. In a society where there aren’t effective legal mechanisms to simply collect a debt, or make a repossession, or condemn someone for theft, what happens?

Gradually society will rot, and common sense learns that the state not only does not serves to collect the debt or reintegrate the good, but also does not serve to punish those who act with violence to take the assets of others.

The logical conclusion is that people should do their own security and collect debt through violence, which is a reality no one wants.

Where the State becomes absent or silent and the law is not fulfilled, Peace is the first victim.

 “ ‘If you want Peace, provide justice’ – averred ancient wisdom; and unlike knowledge, wisdom does not age. Absence of justice is still barring the road to peace today as it did two millennia ago. This has not changed. What has changed is that ‘justice’ now is a planetary issue, grounded in planetary comparisons”
– Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Times: Living in an Age of Uncertainty

At the creation of the National States the Judiciary was built with the purpose of resolving the conflict between Lords and Landowners in a very small number of disputes, not for the whole population. The present stage of the evolution of humanity needs a Judiciary that is present in the resolution of millions of conflicts every day.

The problem of Justice, to be resolved by the Judiciary and also by Advocacy in contemporary times, boils down to the “simple” need to be present in solving millions of conflicts daily, in a much faster and more efficient way and with even more quality and deepening of legal arguments, given that society is even more informed of its rights and this degree of legal knowledge of the population only grows.

The jurisdictional provision has to be scalable and delivered to millions daily, more quickly, efficiently and with even more quality than we have today.

Some will say that this requires hiring thousands of judges and auxiliaries; others will say that even then it would be impossible. In fact, what it takes for Justice to be even more present in citizens’ lives is the Judiciary and Advocacy to enter into the process of Digital Transformation that humanity is entering.

The truth is that to Justice (and its operators lawyers, judges and prosecutors), to persist in an increasingly complex, intense, fast and conflicting world requires self-revolution in order to make technology not only an aid to services legal, but a constant appliance.

The changes in procedural legislation adopted mainly from experiences in Germany seek to introduce a methodology for resolving repetitive processes and general repercussions for society as a way for higher courts to embrace effectively the avalanche of resources that daily enter their stocks. This measure is palliative and only works momentarily for the solution.

The Judiciary (some areas) is much more advanced in adopting digital tools than in advocacy (either in Brazil or worldwide), which still allows it to support demand for some time.

However, over the next few years, according to studies by Oxford University specialist Richard Susskind, current lawyers will disappear and a new generation of digital lawyers will emerge, which will make processes not only much numerous but also much more complex.

The Judiciary, therefore, faces two options:

01. To refrain from providing good judicial delivery by opting for judgments that restrict rights and withdrawing their presence in resolving mass disputes, especially to bury the theses and demands against the State and Large Corporations (which is already happening and causing losses to the entire population);

02. To transform and prepare to be able to respond with quality and speed to the millions of conflicts within society, are they simple or complex, repetitive or rare, adhering to a real digital transformation in all its spheres and remaking the legal and procedural bases to which it was and founded;

In the field of advocacy it is clear that the imminent transformation will be intense. Every day news comes from numerous initiatives involving technology and advocacy. Recently was reported worldwide a robot lawyer, who had won thousands of administrative appeals from traffic tickets in England.

There are countless experiments with Big Data and Artificial Intelligence to replace the work of lawyers, but is this real?

Who knows with some intimacy the Law and Technology knows that it is not quite like this. In order to program robots and even artificial intelligence to perform such complex, subjective and human works, in the operationalization of Law it is necessary a legal mind responsible for building the parameters and arguments in concrete cases – just as that robot had a lawyer next to the programmer to guide, predict and even write the series of arguments necessary for each infraction.

But if there is an unexpected situation as, for example, a mother giving birth to a child, and so the driver was forced to exceed the speed limit, well, this type of situation the robot does not predict or respond alone.

The technology will enable Advocacia and the Judiciary to respond to millions of similar and simple demands and do the most repetitive and time-consuming work, or even go even further to facilitate procedures. But human relations can never be understood by machines, or the reasons for the jurisprudence to change. In a concrete case, “say the right” would be completely impossible to be programmed by a computer that works exclusively with logic.

Personally, I believe that repetitive lawsuits should over time be resolved with the help of robots, given that in the current electronic processes courts impose on lawyers the choices of predetermined fields, which allows the creation of “semi-ready offices” where the advisors do not even read the processes, and thus solve common situations.

This can and should evolve into the initial request with all pre-determined fields in repetitive actions. And with these pre-determined responses, government prosecutors, for example, can pre-configure their disputes, and they are automatically thrown in the process at the same time as the action is filed (in practice, this happens manually in millions of actions against public entities).

If we have automatic contestations for pre-determined initial petitions, why could not there be automatic sentences also pronounced on the same day as the stock entry, opening deadline for appeal in the same day? Of course this is just speculation and futurism, but certainly on some specific and repetitive issues, such a methodology would be beneficial to society and to the judiciary.

Anyway, the possibilities are endless and people need justice to live better, in peace, and to develop individually. Therefore, digital transformation is a necessity to achieve social balance and, finally, to materialize justice in the daily lives of people in this post-globalization era.