From drafting common rules to implementing electronic European Civil Procedures: the rise of e-CODEX

This paper explores the e-CODEX project in its effort to develop a techno-legal system to pilot 'live' (involving real cases and real people) cross-border judicial procedures and ensure its long-term sustainability. It is the understanding of the authors that this experience goes far beyond that of developing a technological tool to support judicial procedures. This is because creating such a tool in the judicial domain requires a reflection on key elements that ensure that procedures are juridically effective in the off-line world, and on how such elements need to be transposed in the digital domain. As there is not a perfect fit between the pff-line and digitaldomains, and different judicial systemshave different requirements, the developing process involves legal (and political) decision-making. Furthermore, as a result of the understanding of the procedures and of their problems generated by developing crossborder e-justicetools, and linked to the need to have the tools adopted by the users, actions are taken to influence not only the procedures themselves, but also their drafting approach. This is done for example addressing procedural offline barriers both at implementation level, both influencing the EU legal instruments drafting/revision to reduce inconsistencies and supporting more semantic coherence. Finally, in its long-term sustainability effort, e-CODEX is becoming part of the EU political agenda and discourse at the highest levels.