Legal Logistics: A Framework to Unify Data Centric Services for Smart and Open Justice

This paper presents a framework to provide a unified view towards the visions of smart and open justice. The framework, coined as Legal Logistics, aims at unifying and embodying different data-centric services that exploit available and relevant data for supporting and enhancing the legitimacy and efficiency of legal systems. As such, the framework specifies the scope of data-centric services in legal systems. Such a unified view of data-centric services, enables the authors to relate these services to each other and to their operational context, and better streamline data-centric based innovations in legal systems. Two data-centric services realized for the Dutch criminal justice system will be discussed. These services innovatively integrate different datasets in order to give some insights about the well-functioning and budgetary needs of the Dutch legal system. These use cases primarily illustrate the typical challenges and benefits of realizing the vision of smart justice. Secondarily, they illustrate the relevancy and usefulness of the embodying Legal Logistics framework.