TJSP partners with Microsoft to develop the new Digital Justice Platform

The president of the São Paulo Court of Justice, judge Manuel de Queiroz Pereira Caldas, signed today (20) a contract with Microsoft for the development of an   entirely new Digital Justice Platform . The president of Microsoft Brazil, Tania Cogentin, and the vice president of Marketing, Sales and Operations of Microsoft Latin America, Paula Bellisa, were present. The president of the Legislative Assembly of São Paulo, Coue Makris, and the deputy governor of the state, Rodrigo Garcia, who represented Governor João Dorian, also attended with Microsoft consulting firm.

The TJSP is quite advanced in the process of digitizing processes (100% of new cases distributed are fully digital) and currently only a part of its collection remains on paper. The contracting of  the Digital Justice Platform  includes the creation of a long-term strategy for the complete digital transformation of the Court's activities and includes the development of a new procedural system. The project provides for the use of the cloud and the adoption of new software for collaboration, communication and productivity, as well as the creation of an innovation and digital transformation center that will technologically empower the court and improve the processing of cases.

Platform announcement

President Pereira Caldas stated that the Court of Justice consulted several global technology companies about the project and that Microsoft was the only one to meet essential items for the TJSP's needs. He also made a point of thanking the people who dedicated themselves to the realization of the partnership, which has as its ultimate objective the use of new technologies for the benefit of the population of São Paulo. “I want to congratulate everyone who dedicated themselves: magistrates, servers and the Microsoft team. A big step is being taken today. There were days and nights of work and everyone is committed to the technological aspect and also to the economic, legal and ethical aspects”. Another point highlighted by the president was the prioritization of “eminently social” activities of the Judiciary. “The first stage of the project will serve the Special Courts and the Adoption system”, he said. And he concluded: “We are all committed so that this work achieves our purpose – that the jurisdictional function of São Paulo gets better and better”.

Tania Cogentin highlighted the importance of the project for the company: “It is with great pride and happiness that I am here, because we have entered into a partnership that is fully aligned with the company's mission: to empower people and organizations to achieve more. And we will work on a visionary project that has an impact for the Court and especially for every citizen of the State”. The president of Microsoft Brazil also spoke about the importance of the Judiciary for the development of the country and how information technology can contribute. “I believe in the democratization of technology so that everyone can use it and for us to have a more competitive, more productive and less unequal Brazil. And justice is essential to reduce inequality in Brazil.”

Paula Bellisa, who was president of Microsoft Brazil at the beginning of the project, explained that the initiative has great relevance for the company not only at the national level, but also in Latin America and the world. Last week, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella came to Brazil and met with the president and members of the TJSP, considered one of the largest courts on the planet. “Technology is the means, not the end activity. The end is what you do with technology. And TJSP's dream of transforming this platform of citizen services is revolutionary. This is a global project and our commitment is to put the best minds in the company to be part of this journey with the Tribunal”.

The president of the Assembly, Coue Makris, and the vice-governor, Rodrigo Garcia, also took the floor. Both highlighted the pioneering spirit of the Digital Justice Platform. “Our obligation as public managers is to make technology also part of the State and the TJSP is once again at the forefront”, stated Makris. Garcia spoke about President Pereira Caldas' enthusiasm for the impact that the platform will have on citizens' lives. “Our presence here is to congratulate you on your decision, because it takes courage to serve society without losing the ability to innovate.”

Prestigious the signing was the vice president of the Court of Justice, judge Artur Marques da Silva Filho; the dean of the TJSP, judge José Carlos Gonzales Xavier de Aquino; the assistant judges of the Presidency of the TJSP for the technology area who work directly on the project Ana Rita de Figueredo Nery, Maria Rita Rebello Pino Dias, Paula Lopes Gomes and Renato Hasegawa Louisan; the assistant judges of the Presidency Marco Fabio Morello, Leandro Saluzzi dos Santos, Camila de Jesus Mello Gonzales, Ana Claudia Daubs Guimaraes and Souza de Miguel, Tatiana Makossa, Airton Pinheiro de Castro, Ricardo Dal Pezzoli and Fabio Coimbra Jonquiere; Information from the TJSP, Roserio Pinto Souza; Microsoft Brazil's Vice President of Services, Antonio Morae's; Microsoft Brazil Finance Director João Paulo Farai; Microsoft Brazil account executives Bruno Pavan and Marcos Braga; Microsoft Brazil solutions manager Marcelo Casado; the digital architect of the Services team, Carlos Teixeira; the technical strategist of Microsoft Brazil solutions, Arthur Martins; Regis Gasper of the Microsoft legal team; magistrates and employees of the TJSP and the company.

The project

The current way of processing processes (including electronic ones) largely reproduces the workflow in physical (paper) processes. The contract for the development of  the Digital Justice Platform  and the consequent move to a cloud computing environment aim to enhance the TJSP's capacity for innovation, increasing its capabilities and at the forefront of innovation, demanded from the increasingly demanded judiciary. With the current system, all installed on servers in the Court's own Data Center, the Judiciary of São Paulo would not have the necessary breath for the innovation and security that an entity of this size needs, in addition to, due to the restriction of storage space, there would be no evolution in the incorporation of new technologies in the process processing system.

Digital transformation is the process by which organizations change from being users of digital technology to becoming, in fact, digital organizations. In general terms, it can benefit judges, employees and lawyers – in short, everyone who is part of the Justice system – who will have productivity and security gains in their daily tasks, and – mainly – the citizen, who gains access to a more agile Justice, efficient, transparent and reliable.

For effective innovation, there will be a review and construction of new process workflows, with the objective of maximizing the automation of activities that, respecting the procedural rites governed by law, will bring more agility to the Justice of São Paulo. With cloud computing, the TJSP also gains more stability and security, in addition to leveraging innovations and increasing capabilities at an intense pace, keeping the entity at the forefront of the Brazilian judiciary.

Some of the benefits:

1.Cyber ​​security – Judicial systems and legal records need to be protected from cyber attacks and cloud adoption represents a much higher level of document and information protection; 

2.Real-time collaboration – Using digital technology one can access information remotely, including online legal documents, document packages, proceedings and up-to-date hearing schedules, as well as communicate and collaborate in real time;

3.Electronic Scheduling – Automation tools allow staff to perform various scheduling functions including: remote hearings, recording hearings, updating orders, etc.;

4.Support for case information – Data analysis can help judges identify repetitive demands. Digital tools also allow judges to view the historical record of sentences for similar cases;

5.Automated archiving and retrieval – A significant amount of time is spent by prosecutors, lawyers, servers and magistrates searching, analyzing and storing legal documents. New technologies allow these processes to be automated and accelerated, resulting in faster and better-informed decision making;

6.Online and Interactive Citizens and Lawyers Service Portals – Online portals give citizens new and better ways to interact with the parties to the process, minimizing the need for formal and face-to-face consultations in notaries, for example.

7.The option for the platform that includes Infrastructure as a Service, Software as a Service and Platform as a Service was also guided by the interest of ensuring constant technological evolution of the system, as global technology companies pursue this objective, making its development more agile, dynamic and natively compatible with services that don't even exist yet and that may exist in the future and that will be available in the public cloud.

For the 1st year are planned:

A) Development and implementation of a case management solution for judicial proceedings with the support of the minimum regulatory requirements defined by the National Council of Justice (CNJ) to meet the competence of the Special Civil Court (JEC) in 1st and 2nd Instance;

B) Implementation of the Adoption Registration Portal to assist in the meeting between registered applicants and children and adolescents in a situation of adoption.

The project can be separated into two major stages:

1.The first goes until the 3rd year, which is the deadline for all judicial competences in the areas of Private, Public and Criminal Law (physical and digital processes) to be included in the new platform, in addition to the migration of all old processes. The last two years will be dedicated to creating innovations and improving the platform.

2.The  Digital Justice Platform  will comply with the MNI and the legal requirement of interoperability, creating a single statewide system;

3.The TJSP, in its own file, stipulated the conditions it expects for the Digital Justice Platform, whether in terms of technology and innovation, or in terms of business conditions (co-ownership of the source code of customized development and prohibition of subcontracting due to the risk technology involved);

4.The requirement of co-ownership of the Source Code is an important achievement, which allows the TJSP to develop, evolve and sustain the new Platform by its own or outsourced team, in the latter case with bidding – which is not possible today with the current system . In practice, this means that, after the contract with Microsoft has ended, the TJSP will be free to hire other companies that may have access to the source codes for the eventual provision of services to the Court with regard to the Digital Justice Platform;

5.Having established these conditions, the TJSP consulted leading companies in the cloud technology market, regarding their interest in hiring. It is noteworthy that, of the companies consulted, only Microsoft showed to fulfill the requirements and interest in the undertaking;        

6.Given the normative provision, there was a direct contracting of a technological order for an innovative product, based on art. 20, caput and §4, of Law nº 10.973/04 – Innovation Law), and in art. 24, XXXI Law No. 8.666/93 (Bidding and Contracts Law), with grounds presented in authorization contained in File No. 2018/147144, pursuant to CSM Provision No. 2.138/13 and other rules governing the matter. To ensure the legality of the measure, the TJSP consulted Florian Peixoto de Azevedo Marques and Fernando Dias Menezes de Almeida, professors of Administrative Law at the University of São Paulo Law School and the first director of that institution.

7.The contracting of  the Digital Justice Platform  involves services for the development and implementation of the Digital Justice Platform; platform support services and licensing of software and services. The total value of the contract is BRL 1.32 billion, to be paid in monthly installments over the five-year validity of the contract and as the project stages are delivered. The contracted company has experience in digital transformation for public organizations around the world, including in the area of ​​Justice (UK and Abu Dhabi), where they revolutionized the legal system. The use of the cloud, for example, has created an innovative new legal platform for dispute resolution in Abu Dhabi.

8.It is noteworthy that this is a complex execution project given the characteristics of the TJSP in terms of number of employees and volume of processes. The TJSP, considered the largest in the world in terms of volume of cases, is responsible for 25% of the total cases in progress in Brazilian Justice (Relator Justice me Numerus 2017/CNJ). It is also the court with the largest workforce: 2,600 magistrates and approximately 43,000 civil servants, in 320 districts of the state. When choosing  the Digital Justice Platform , the TJSP considered the fixed annual cost of maintaining the current system for processing cases, comparing it with the fixed annual cost that will be incurred after five years of contracting and found a cost reduction of about 40 %. Therefore, the measure, in addition to the many other benefits, will result in savings.

9.As the  Digital Justice Platform  will be developed entirely in the cloud, as opposed to the current system, TJSP will no longer invest, proportionally, in updating its data center computing facilities, in addition to the respective redundancy (backup). In 2021 the TJSP will renew its computing park due to the obsolescence of the current one and this will happen during the term of the  Digital Justice Platform contract. This fact will make the TJSP not need to spend a considerable amount for the renovation of its computing park. The maintenance of its own data center burdens the TJSP with a high cost in relation to the IT environment for the existing system, in addition to labor costs to maintain systems, licenses, upgrade equipment and energy bill. All these costs will be drastically reduced with the migration of legal proceedings to the cloud.

10.To expand the audience recording system, for example, it would be necessary to set up a new data center. The cloud has virtually infinite processing capacity, which allows the addition of new services at much lower costs and, above all, much faster. In addition, there is an important gain in security and data protection. By migrating information to the Microsoft data center, TJSP is now protected by a company that invests more than US$ 1 billion annually in security. The TJSP understands that given the volume and complexity of the São Paulo Courts, it is necessary to develop a platform capable of offering benefits such as high availability, efficiency and productivity, as well as protection against cyber threats, which is not possible today with existing solutions.

11.With regard to the Puja, it appears that it does not allow the processing of physical processes, which would require the maintenance of the current system, and, therefore, doubling costs with teams for support, development and other related costs.