Legal Information System - Observatory of Public Sector Innovation

Office of Legislation has introduced a single national legal information system offering to the public the information on adopted laws, regulations and other legal acts free of charge, including EU and national case law, consolidated texts, and other information with significant impact on the application of national law. In addition to efficient and quick search through all sources of law, users can easily monitor the process of planning and adopting laws and regulations.

Innovation Summary

Innovation Overview

Both the professionals public (notaries, lawyers, civil servants, etc.) and the citizens need to be acquainted with applicable legislation and related case law, legislative proposals of the Government, status of ongoing legislative procedures, as well as with their obligations and rights under EU law.

In order to have all this information in one place, free of charge, the Government Office of Legislation introduced a single national portal, called Legal Information System of the Republic of Slovenia (PIS).

There are two types of beneficiaries of this project:
- public authorities which devoted a considerable amount of budget funds to the use of commercial legal and business information systems in order to have relevant information gathered in one place,
- professional and general public which had no single platform to easily find relevant legal information.

The implementation of this national legal system resulted not only in enhancing public access to national and EU law and jurisprudence, but also in implementing open data strategy and in budget savings of 1,2 million EUR per year.

Since its launch in 2014, the portal has been gaining popularity in various end-user segments and is expected to keep gaining users attention as analytical figures increase by about 10 percent annually. In 2017, there were 10 million page views and 150,000 active monthly users recorded, indicating usefulness and exceptional importance of providing free, transparent and reliable legal information.

Innovation Description

What Makes Your Project Innovative?

The Legal Information System is an innovation because:

1) It is user-friendly and responsive. Despite the huge amount of information that originates from the very nature of complex and frequent legislative procedures, the portal is clear and transparent, without unnecessary data and links.

2) It addresses both the inexperienced users as well as legal professionals; that is why the structure of the website was designed from the perspective of the end user. Information is available in a very structured way, e.g. basic legal metadata and corresponding texts and documents are front-lined and covered by a larger structural unit, with the advanced levels of display where data grouping is enabled and leading the user from basic to more complex information, if needed.

3) It integrates more than 15 registers and databases which are administered by different public authorities, several of them being available online solely via this portal.

What is the current status of your innovation?

As of the date of launch in 2014, the portal has already achieved its goals.

We are now at the stage of gathering proposals to upgrade the portal in order to be even more user-friendly, to offer additional legal information by integrating new databases and registers, and to adapt it to the technical progress.

Innovation Development

Collaborations & Partnerships

Office of Legislation launched the project. However, in order to integrate all necessary data and documents from several administrators, it was a must to collaborate closely with different public authorities, i.e. Supreme Court, Constitutional Court, Parliament, Secretary-General of the Government, Publications Office, State Attorney's Office etc.

Users, Stakeholders & Beneficiaries

Public officials use the portal on a daily basis. It is no longer needed to use commercial legal and business information systems to obtain relevant information.
Professionals (notaries, lawyers, legal experts) also use the portal on a very frequent basis, some of them daily.
General public use the portal daily. In addition to the possibility of searching for information, a mailbox is created for questions which are, if necessary, forwarded to the competent authority to provide an answer.

Innovation Reflections

Results, Outcomes & Impacts

Since 2014 the portal has been gaining popularity in various end-user segments.
In 2017, there were 10 million page views and 150,000 active monthly users recorded.
It is expected for the portal to keep gaining users attention as analytical figures increase by about 10 percent annually.

Challenges and Failures

The main challenge is to monitor efficiently if data has been processed in total coverage and on time. Several Service Level Agreements has been established to this end. However, there is still a great data independence risk.

In response, Office of Legislation is in daily contact with all data administrators to ensure no data gaps. In the future, we would like to introduce common standards of data integration to be applied by all sources and service providers.

Conditions for Success

For the implementation of this project it was inevitable:
- to have support from senior management;
- to gain interest and to present advantages of the portal for other public authorities (data providers);
- to obtain financial resources for IT programming;
- to have focused and goal oriented leadership.

Replication

This innovation could be replicated by other countries, governments, or organisations.
Part of the portal design and structure has already been used by the public company in Slovenia, namely for the register of regulations adopted at the level of municipalities (http://rpls.pisrs.si/).

Lessons Learned

The project required high end performance in planning, budgeting, contracting, structuring and presenting arguments, leading and coordinating legal and IT experts. In our opinion, the project could be implemented much faster and more efficiently by having in-house IT experts rather than outsource that part of the job.

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