COMPUTERIZATION OF THE BRAZILIAN COURTS AND CHANGES IN THE JUDICIAL BUREAUCRACY: LINEARITY AND INSTANTANEITY OBSERVED WITH THE HELP OF THE TEXT MINING METHODOLOGY

Abstract

This article seeks to evaluate the role of the computerization of Brazilian courts in the efficiency of judicial bureaucracy. For this, text mining technique was applied to large databases to extract electronic data from procedural progress in four courts in the country. The goal was to diagnose the number of routines in the procedural progress, among other information from the computerized process, to assess the impacts on the judicial bureaucracy. Among the results achieved, it can be seen that, despite the different electronic systems adopted, the standards presented in all the metrics analyzed in the four courts were very similar. Also, it is clear that, despite computerization, dependence on human work, specifically on the servant, is still very intense. Finally, it is also verified that the number of routines in the progress of the process is large (hundreds and, in some cases, more than a thousand of them). In this way, even if each one has a short duration, the process ends up becoming long. Thus, behind the apparent speed and efficiency of the electronic process, there is a delay due to the requirement to comply with hundreds of routines and perhaps this is the main obstacle to greater speed in the post-informatization judicial process.

Keywords
Computerization of courts; judicial bureaucracy; procedural progress; text mining; judicial efficiency