Navarra Justice Department: Court Administration Solution

To achieve its vision to become a technology leader in how it administers justice services, the Justice Department of the autonomous community of Navarra in Spain implemented a court administration system developed by Accenture on the Microsoft.NET platform.

In recent years, Spain's judicial system has experienced a tremendous increase in the number of cases brought before the courts—from some 2.5 million cases annually in the early 1980s to more than 7 million in 2000. The number of cases has skyrocketed in large part due to several technological, organizational and legal hurdles the justice system has faced in its attempts to modernize. Not surprisingly, citizens and the media frequently voice their dissatisfaction about the persistent legal log jams.

Reforms to address these deficiencies have been underway throughout Spain's legal system. At the regional level, Navarra, one of Spain's 17 autonomous communities, had a vision to become a technology leader in providing justice services and public administrative services in general. The country's Justice Department wanted to increase the efficiency of its administration to satisfy the growing public demands for better access to information and improved coordination among key legal parties involved.

The current reality was that the Navarra courts were spending enormous amounts of time carrying out administrative tasks and trying to locate information—that was not shared from one court location to another, which created great redundancies and complications. Judges, clerks and civil servants relied on entrenched processes, paper files and antiquated systems that were no longer supported and often fell short of meeting the escalating caseload needs of judges, citizens, attorneys and prosecutors. Along with the legally required paper-based files, a parallel electronic solution was seen as a way to more efficiently manage information and administrative processes.

"After analyzing several existing tools in the marketplace," says Rafael Gurrea, Navarra Justice Department counselor, "we selected Accenture's Atlante solution for its features, flexibility and growth possibilities as our best option."

The Navarra Justice Department began the search for a solution by commissioning a study of court administration systems used in Spain. Of all the systems evaluated, the Navarra government selected the Accenture solution created for the court system.

The Navarra Justice Department chose to collaborate with Accenture to implement an innovative court administration solution that possesses rich functionality, the ability to integrate with the various justice organizations and one that is based on Microsoft technologies, the Navarra government standard. These were capabilities that did not already exist. Together, the department and Accenture outlined a solution based on the Microsoft platform that combined a new approach to handling the administration of court cases with the latest Microsoft .NET technologies.

In May 2002, a Navarra team began working with Accenture to design and build a technical architecture based on the Microsoft Windows 2000 Advanced Server platform using SQL Server 2000, Visual Studio .NET (C#), and Microsoft Office System XP. To ensure the best possible success with this state-of-art version, Microsoft provided up-front technical expertise and detailed product information and support.

Complementing this team were the deep technical skills of Avanade, a joint venture company of Microsoft and Accenture, called upon to bring the strongest possible resources to the project. The role of Avanade was to design and develop the technical architecture, to perform programming and to conduct testing. Its experience in developing large-scale solutions based on Microsoft .NET was critical to the success of the project.

The decision to use .NET set the stage for Navarra to use Web-based applications that would allow a high level of software integration with information, people and potentially other Navarra governmental systems, such as police and prison systems. From a technical standpoint, the Justice department was particularly interested in having the interconnectivity among its far-flung court locations. A Web-based solution was the best approach for meeting that need. The solution would also provide a solid investment for the foreseeable future and complement Navarra's other governmental systems.

By implementing the first Web-based justice court information system in Spain, the autonomous community of Navarra has greatly changed the way the courts work by improving interactions among legal parties and positioning itself for more efficient processes around the administration of court cases. Avantius is expected to deliver results similar to those achieved by the Canary Island system, which has more than doubled the rate at which the justice courts are able to process cases. Already, the Navarra courts have experienced shortened times to resolve cases.

Accenture collaborated with the Navarra Justice Department to help make a transformational shift to improve the efficiency and quality of court operations and thus, the faster rendering of judicial decisions. "The participation and hard work of the user's group of the Navarra Justice Department and Accenture's teamwork enabled us to achieve the perfect solution that maximizes the performance and operations of Navarra's court system," notes Gurrea.

Reaction from the Navarra public and others has been extremely positive, with Avantius viewed as a major success even after a relatively short time of operation. The Justice Department is already making the transition from being a backlogged bureaucracy to a more streamlined, high performance organization.

Going forward, Avantius holds the potential as a flexible file management platform to administer not only Navarra Justice Department information, but also any type of document-based system for public administration and the automation of routine activities between citizens and the government. Given this, the government of Navarra is studying the possibilities of expanding the capabilities of Avantius to provide a selection of government services on the Internet, such as registering for a driver's license, gathering citizen complaints and suggestions, paying traffic tickets, filing birth certificates and other routine activities.

Other regional governments have noticed Navarra's success. The government of another autonomous community, the Basque country, has engaged Accenture to use Avantius as the platform to manage its traffic violation records.