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The total number of the filed electronic lawsuit cases in the Court Case Management System (CCMS) has exceeded 500 thousand. This has happened only 18 months after Information Services implemented the Court Case Management System. It covers the district, regional courts, courts of appeal, the Specialized Criminal Court, military courts, the Appellate Specialized Criminal Court and the Supreme Court of Cassation. For comparison, the indicators of the project that is financed by the European Social Fund through the Operational Program "Good governance" 2014-2020, set a goal 250 thousand cases to be filed in the CCMS until 2023. Currently, the system covers all the 153 courts, 152 of which work with all its functionalities. About 69% of the cases are civil, 28% - criminal, 3% are commercial, and the rest are corporate. The total number of the parties under the initiated cases after implementing the software product exceeds 3.4 million and the number of other stakeholders related to the litigations is over 2.7 million.
Launching the CCMS and the opportunities it provides for management and access to entirely electronic cases through the Integrated e-Justice Portal, significantly facilitates the access to justice for citizens and legal entities.
“Our estimates show that since putting the system into operation until now to the citizens and companies have been saved more than BGN 7 million and more than 2300 days of time thanks to the completely electronic access provided”, the Information Services` CEO Ivaylo Filipov said. According to him, the system has significantly optimized the work process and increased the efficiency of magistrates and court staff. Only from paper for court acts and documents, the savings to the courts are more than BGN 110 thousand.
Since June 2020 till now, more than 1.377 million electronic court acts have been enacted, created as electronic documents and signed with a qualified electronic signature. More than 10,000 users amongst which almost 2,000 judges, more than 4,500 court staff, 3,400 jurors and nearly 600 summoners, actively use the CCMS.
The developed software functionalities lead to an increased interest towards the Integrated e-Justice Portal (IEJP). In a period of just 18 months it gives 2 times more court cases sent, 3 times more court documents sent and 3 times more users compared to the period 2015-2020. After the CCMS launch, due to the increased interest towards the electronic cases in IEJP, more than 660 000 old cases, heard in other record keeping systems, have been published. According to Filipov the increased users’ interest towards the system shows the high quality of the executed project and the need to continue investing in the e-justice.
The Court Case Management System contains 19 functional and 19 system modules. It ensures full transparency, publicity and traceability at court cases management. It unifies the rules and processes in cases management, increases the efficiency of magistrates, court employees and the entire court administration work. The CCMS provides an easier access opportunity for the court cases parties to the respective cases in the Integrated e-Justice Portal as well as a real-time access to data from other information systems and opportunity for inquiries in external registries such as BULSTAT, NRA, NSSI, MI, Trade Registry etc. The access to the system and the signing of the acts in it is possible only through a qualified electronic signature (QES) only by authorized users. This provides a high level of security, personal data protection and data security. Each user action is recorded with a detailed information regarding the performing time and the actions of each user.
The system provides the opportunity cases to be real-time tracked, even before the paper copies of documents under the case get received in the respective court. It unites the overall case management process – initiating a case, random distribution of a judge-rapporteur, court hearings holding, enactment and depersonalization of acts, court statistics, judges workload, financial case management, summons management etc.
The system allows centralized storage of cases in electronic format, which significantly reduces the time to create and manage an electronic case folder. CCMS provides an opportunity for magistrates to work distantly from any point of the world using a highly secured channel through QES.
The Court Case Management System gives a strong impetus to the e-justice in Bulgaria”, Ivaylo Filipov stated. According to him, it also protects the rights of citizens, ensuring publicity, transparency and traceability of the processes.