The State must not seek to establish specifications that limit the creativity of teams of developers and lawyers. It must accompany the dynamics of creation or means of investment.
Following the example of the free partnership companies created by the so-called Macron law in August 2015, with a view to associating investors and investment funds in SMEs in good governance and inspired by the limited partnerships of Common Law, a flexible private/public partnership mechanism with the presence of the State could be devised to develop legal techs.
Legal Tech's shared technology base
Provision of existing tools under "legaltech license
In return for the State's investment, legal tech companies would undertake to license their creation on a reciprocal basis. It would establish the principle of a sharing of the commons reserved for the members of a community, under conditions that depend on the contributions of each, with a general principle of granting the licence to the State for the needs of the digital public service of Justice.
This licence, which is the basis for the constitution of the common application base and its governance, would have two restrictions:
- The first would be that only states would be beneficiaries of the licence. It would be a kind of reverse public information licence, in which private companies would make their technologies/data available to States. This opening up would therefore also allow foreign States to benefit from the investments of the French State, in order to integrate French legal tech tools into their systems.
- The second restriction would be that French legal tech companies would retain their right to adapt. States would therefore be obliged, in order to adapt French technologies to their national procedures and constraints, to call on the services of French legal tech.
For a combined development of the digital administration and the digital economy
State investment in the private sector would thus create digital justice commons, through fruitful collaboration between the public and private sectors for faster, more efficient and fairer justice.
