“All Rise For the Honorable AI”: Algorithmic Management in Polish Electronic Courts
Polish courts are using algorithms to support their decision-making process, e.g. for evaluating cases or issuing resolutions. Some see AI as a game changer, but the lack of a critical assessment and transparency as well as the impact on judges’ independence and fairness are reasons for concern.
Marcin Gorski is an attorney and a professor at the University of Łódź in Poland. He devoted many years to providing pro bono legal aid. Every week, he sees people who need consultations about enforcement proceedings by court bailiffs and complications with the Polish electronic court system.
"I do encounter some practical issues related to the use of electronic courts," Gorski says. These encounters make him feel critical about the courts.
An electronic court is a judicial system in which legal proceedings are conducted digitally. The сlaimant communicates with the electronic court online, using a dedicated system.
The Polish Ministry of Justice’s IT system that supports electronic enforcement proceedings was introduced in 2009. Following a legislative framework, the electronic court in Lublin emerged. The system allows the issuance of electronic payment orders in simple cases, such as disputes involving non-payment in small businesses.
Hijacking the system
Gorski says that scammers were quick to exploit this setup: Deceitful Polish businesses use unlawfully obtained personal information to intercept payment orders. In Poland, defendants aren’t required to receive the payments personally. This loophole enabled fraudsters to claim the money. The most vulnerable targets were elderly individuals living on fixed pensions.
In most cases, people only sought help several months into the enforcement process, once they discovered the scheme and realized their money had been stolen. They oftentimes feel too embarrassed to do something about it. By the time they reach out for legal assistance, it is often too late.
The algorithm used to process such cases fails to detect patterns of suspicious behavior, such as multiple claims being submitted by the same company on similar matters. There are evident signs of cheating, such as consistent handwriting across all documents, yet they go unnoticed by the system.
“Some of these people were about to commit suicide because they lack the means even to buy medication – let alone dealing with this sort of plot,” says Gorski.
In an academic paper, Gorski analyzed the issue of AI-driven courts without human supervision and the right to a fair trial. He assessed nine elements of this right, noting that fairness, particularly in terms of humanism, might be compromised in certain cases.
Great expectations
Others consider electronic courts a game changer. In 2019, Polish media reported on Ultima Ratio, the first electronic arbitration court that integrates the start-up IUS.AI's Machine Learning technology.
Ultima Ratio's founders belong to the Polish Notary Association. They held high hopes for the use of Artificial Intelligence and believed that by upgrading the system, they could automate 80% of case management and verdict issuance. The technology was expected to assist arbitrators in drafting justifications for decisions by analyzing past cases. The system was promised to be up and running within a year.
However, over the course of five years, the system never became operational. Robert Szczepanek, one of its co-founders, admits that "it didn't provide the promised results.”
Administration of justice or administration of the workload?
Despite this setback, Szczepanek is now excited about a new hi-tech endeavor. Ultima Ratio has now partnered with Microsoft and plans to develop GPT-based models to justify verdicts, according to an interview with AlgorithmWatch.
Szczepanek plans to reduce economic costs for the court – arbitrators are paid by the hour. "The less time they spend judging, the more effective the arbitration, and the less costly it becomes for the parties,” he explains. “OpenAI and all those technologies that deal with generative AI are game changers in the legal industry," he adds.
Ultima Ratio has an even more ambitious goal than five years ago: to shorten the average time for decision preparation by 90%. In addition to cutting arbitrator fees, the algorithm is expected to standardize decisions. The verdicts “will be in line with other verdicts issued in similar cases," according to Szczepanek, which means the system will feed on previous cases like any other AI-powered system. This can lead to the replication of biases.
Marcin Gorski believes that automating the drafting of opinions comes with certain risks. “The algorithm is meant to interpret my thoughts, while the reasoning behind a particular decision should be based on my sole reasoning and not that of the algorithm's,” he argues.
Gorski notes that judges have a problem with work overload in Poland: Some handle up to 600 cases annually, he says, an average of three cases a day. Judges resort to automation to cope with such a workload, regardless of whether it is the best solution.
Blind automation
Another Polish company, ENOIK, launched an arbitration court based on Artificial Intelligence in early 2024. The company received 6.4 million złoty (about 1.5 million euro) in 2014 from EU funds. The entire investment costed 8.4 million złoty (about 2 million euro at the time).
The court's website says that, after evidentiary proceedings, the system suggests a preliminary resolution to the arbitrator. The algorithm bases its decision on a sample of over half a million cases resolved by common courts. The arbitrator then has the chance to assess both the facts of the case and the analysis given by the algorithm before issuing a judgment of the case.
Anna Cybulko, PhD and expert on Gender Equality Law at the European Equality Law Network, argues that humans often refrain from interfering with the results generated by algorithms due to the so-called overconfidence effect in AI tools: “We tend to use the given data as the binding data.” A second issue stems from the difficulty of verifying the automated systems' output, she says.
The ENOIK court puts pressure on arbitrators by promising that algorithmic support will be able to ensure the resolution of legal disputes within 40 working hours. "If a person has to work twice as fast or four times as fast as normally based on the results of the system, then this person cannot be held accountable for his or her work," she says.