A modern and innovative vision of justice serving the Malian people
Malian justice has been faced for several years with a simple problem but with serious consequences: clerks are poorly trained and must put up with working conditions made difficult by a low level of equipment. The notes and hearing reports prove practically unusable in the vast majority of cases. Therefore, dispensing justice on the basis of substantiated and documented cases becomes a challenge for judges.
The country's police stations and gendarmes encounter the same difficulties; the reports of hearings and interrogations are not usable and make the investigation of cases very complicated.
The concepts of storage and archiving are also a major concern. The time for justice is sometimes, often, a long time. The long-term preservation of files and the documents that constitute them is a necessity to guarantee fair justice. Here too, the challenges are major and the conditions difficult: the premises and equipment are not or only poorly suited to the conservation of such documents.
Under the leadership of the Keeper of the Seals and Minister of Justice of Mali, Mr. Mamadou Konate, a digital transformation project for justice has seen the light of day. This project was structured around a management solution which had to respond to three major challenges: offering a document digitization solution in order to centralize all information relating to a processed file, offering a digital recording and automatic transcription solution, offer a strong capacity for customization to adapt to the practices specific to each equipped entity.
The ministry then launched a consultation with several publishers, mainly European, to develop an innovative solution that meets local constraints, both technical and financial. Jarvis Legal has established itself as the fully hosted management solution open to the ecosystem through its powerful API, and which met all the criteria set out in the call for tenders.
Jarvis Legal wins tender
We spent many hours building the offer that won over the Mali Ministry of Justice. This was a real challenge, both technical (we had to integrate functions that we did not have at the time) and financial (the project was financed by the Netherlands through its Embassy in Mali). However, we were the only publisher capable of responding to all of the requests made.
Our offer of course included the management solution for lawyers and legal professionals, ranked 1st for the third consecutive year by the Décideurs magazine, but also digital dictaphones and high-performance scanners. These devices have been specially selected for their ability to connect to Jarvis Legal via their API.
The work was only just beginning for our R&D team. Many challenges had to be overcome to perfectly integrate these different services and make them easy to use for users.
Rigorous preparatory work
Once the contract was won, a first mission was carried out in the summer of 2017. It aimed to meet the people involved in the project and to audit the places which would be equipped with Jarvis Legal. Although easy to deploy because it is fully hosted, Jarvis Legal still requires two essential elements to operate: an Internet connection (a simple ADSL connection is sufficient) and a computer. However, the sites visited were not or very poorly equipped. The local authorities showed great responsiveness by ordering the materials and Internet connections necessary for the deployment of Jarvis Legal.
At the same time, our R&D teams worked on the integration of the APIs for the scanners and digital dictaphones provided as part of the call for tenders. They also worked on the integration of the voice recognition service, capable of continuous improvement thanks to autonomous neural-type learning.
In particular, the challenge of simplifying operations had to be met to ensure that a user could easily scan a document by placing it directly in the right folder. Or he can record a hearing, pleading or deposition and simply drop the file into Jarvis Drive to then start transcribing it, automatically transforming it into a ready-made Word document, all in seconds.
A successful deployment
The deployment mission was carried out in January 2019. It took place over a week, in Bamako and the surrounding towns. The Secretary General of the Ministry of Justice of Mali and the Ambassador of the Netherlands to Mali inaugurated the official launch of Jarvis Legal on this occasion.
Beyond the deployment of the management solution, we took care of the training of future users as well as local administrators. We also supported them in the configuration and personalization of their spaces, each site having its own environment. The equipment has also been deployed on each site.
We were particularly impressed by the concentration and involvement of the speakers on site. It is thanks to them that the project was a success and could be implemented in the best conditions.
Justice better equipped to face the challenges of today and tomorrow
With Jarvis Legal, courts, gendarmes and police stations can now digitize the documents in the files investigated, save them in a single and secure database and thus share common information which will be consultable by authorized people. The latter will therefore be able to rely on reliable and lasting information to make their decisions.
Court reports and depositions are automatically written and saved in the correct file. This is a considerable time saver for all those involved. The quality of information reaches a previously unmatched level of quality and reliability.
The judges finally have complete, detailed and quality information, whose chronology of facts and decisions are indisputable. The information is centralized, so that any authorized person can consult the documents that are always up to date. Registrars save precious time for a result of unequivocal quality.
A first step that calls for others
This project is only the first brick in the digital transformation undertaken by the Malian government. Other needs can be covered by new innovative solutions such as civil status and census but also land registry management. These two examples are formidable levers for the Malian state which can thus better understand the choices which will engage it in the coming decades.
