Analysis 4 min read
Court decision open data and litigation origination.
Since 2021, France has been putting its court decisions online, in stages and in pseudonymised form. This data makes it possible to spot serial litigation.
Hello Justice, editorial team Updated
In France, pending proceedings are not public. Decisions become public once handed down, free of charge and in pseudonymised form. This is called court decision open data: making decisions available to the public in a format that software can read. The movement, launched by the Digital Republic law of 2016, has been rolled out in stages since 2021. It changes how serial litigation is spotted.
The texts, from 2016 to 2021.
The Digital Republic law of 7 October 2016 sets the principle in its articles 20 and 21. Court decisions are made available to the public free of charge. The justice programming law of 23 March 2019 sets out the arrangements and adds a limit, described below. The decree of 29 June 2020 organises the system. The order of 28 April 2021 sets the timetable, court by court.
The publication timetable.
| Decisions concerned | Online from |
|---|---|
| Cour de cassation | 30 September 2021 |
| Courts of appeal, civil matters | April 2022 |
| Commercial courts | End of 2024 |
| Tribunaux judiciaires, civil matters | 30 September 2025 |
| Labour tribunals | Scheduled for 30 September 2026 |
The decisions are distributed through Judilibre, the Cour de cassation’s open database. Anyone can consult it, and software can query it through a dedicated interface. Since autumn 2025, most civil litigation at first instance and on appeal can therefore be read by software, decision by decision.
What it changes for detection.
Serial litigation starts with a legal event: a landmark decision, a challenged standard contract, a regulator’s sanction. Before open data, spotting these events required long and costly documentary monitoring. Series were discovered late, often through the press.
Since 2025, the flow of civil decisions can be analysed continuously. It allows several uses.
- Following case‑law trends, court by court.
- Counting decisions by legal question, to estimate the size of a series.
- Finding the regions where the same dispute recurs.
- Watching a series develop, from the first decision to the next ones.
A funder can thus spot a series before the first cases reach it.
Vigie.
Vigie™, our proprietary litigation detection algorithm, applies this principle. It queries open sources, Judilibre first, with queries specific to each type of dispute. It removes duplicates and keeps the history of each signal.
Vigie then ranks the series it finds against the criteria of serial litigation: the strength of the law, the number of people affected, limitation and the defendant’s solvency. Limitation is the time limit for bringing a claim. It assesses series of disputes, and no individual litigant is rated.
Detection is automated. The legal analysis and the decision to fund remain human: specialised partner lawyers confirm or reject each series. The method is described on our method page.
The Swiss franc loan programme illustrates this cycle. The series appeared in published decisions well before the Cour de cassation’s two rulings of 9 July 2025, recent case law, liable to change. The programme organises the preparation of cases online.
The limits set by law.
Open data has rules. Individuals are pseudonymised in published decisions and must remain so. Article L. 111-13 of the French Code of Judicial Organisation was introduced by the law of 23 March 2019. It prohibits reusing the identities of judges and court clerks to assess, analyse or predict their practices. The law makes such reuse a criminal offence.
Analyses are therefore made by court, never by judge. These limits do not hinder the detection of series, which concerns legal questions and groups of people. Vigie complies with these rules.
France and the United States.
In the United States, the dockets of pending proceedings are public, and a dispute can be spotted as soon as it is filed. In France, writs are not public, but the decisions handed down become public. Detection therefore starts from the decisions. It identifies the legal questions that recur and the people they affect, which requires legal analysis backed by software.
From data to case.
Detection is followed by legal analysis by specialised partner lawyers and by informing the people affected. Each situation is then checked online, and each case gathers its documents. Finally, the proceedings are run through to their outcome. We describe these steps in our article on serial litigation.
