Law is about language and language about communication. Yet, legal communication is often a mess. This mess is mainly caused by inefficient communication in legal proceedings. Instead of establishing a factual base and exchanging legal opinions ad hoc, court documents are sent out as paper documents and regularly have unstructured contents. This causes a massive delay in legal decision-making and very often burries the presiding judge in paper-work.
Each year in Germany alone about 1.3 Million first instance civil cases are filed. Decisions on small claims (up to 5,000.- EUR) take 4.9 months on average, while decisions on larger claims generally require 9.8 months (cf. BMJ statistics on 'Geschäftsentwicklung der Zivilsachen in der Eingangs- und Rechtsmittelinstanz für das Jahr 2016').
We bring structure into the mess. The LEXEM e-Management-System is a live platform, that brings claimant, respondent and deciding judge together.
The claimant will be able to file its claim, describe the relevant facts and proofs, and provide its legal reasoning entirely online. The respondent can then respond to the issues addressed by the claimant and formulate its defenses on the platform. Due to the structure of the online platform, the parties are required to present their arguments in a well-organized way.
The deciding judge can review the process and make private annotations at any time. Furthermore, when the parties have finally submitted their arguments, the judge will have the possibility to (re)structure the parties'arguments in a way that he/she considers most appropriate.
The LEXEM e-Management-System essentially assists judges in their decision-making process by:
- encouraging the parties to clearly structure their arguments;
- allowing judges work on the structured information provided; and
- thus, immensly speeding up the legal decision process.
By optimizing the legal communication between parties and judges, the latter will require less time to resolve individual cases. This will improve access to justice in the long-term, as more legal disputes can be resolved in a shorter period of time.
The German legal services market alone created a turnover of 23.241 Billion EUR in 2015 (cf. pos. 69.1, 'Jahrbuch des statistischen Bundesamtes 2017'). Taking into consideration our solution will mostly apply to non-complex legal proceedings, excluding 'large' and 'specialized' cases (the top 100 German law firms had a turnover of 5.91 Billion EUR in 2016/2017, cf. JUVE Kanzleiumsätze 2016/2017), it could still - conservatively - be assumed that the total addressable market amounts to about 10 Billion EUR.
As the logic of our platform applies to any constellation where legal rules apply and parties raise legal and factual arguments, our solution can be applied to various legal contexts (e.g. civil and common law jurisdictions, arbitration).
LEXEM will be provided as software as a service.