Since the end of 2022, the EEEI and Euroexpert have been working with several partners and the European Commission to facilitate access to experts in Europe as part of the “Find an Expert II” project.
As part of this project, Work Package 4 (WP4) is looking at the specifications and functions of a search engine that will in future enable European citizens (lawyers, magistrates, litigants) to quickly search a centralised database for information on experts in the various Member States.
This phase of the project is led by Pawel Rybicki and Jean-Raymond Lemaire, founding chairman of the EEEI. It brings together people from the various professions involved in legal expertise and directly concerned using the future tool – in particular, Jan Van Wannenmacher, an Austrian judge, and Sylvain Joyeux, a French lawyer specialising in litigation and IT expertise.
During its work, the working group focused its methodology on the user experience: the future tool will have to be comprehensive, accessible, and easy to use, and include the main information relating to a judicial expert’s profile. Inspired by the “Find a Lawyer” tool, which already centralises the profiles of European lawyers, its mission will be to increase the visibility of experts and enable magistrates, lawyers and litigants to make a more informed choice of expert. Users will be able to search for and then browse the profiles of different experts, to consult information relating to their practice: names and contact details, languages spoken, specialities and field of expertise, attachment to a national court, etc.
The members of the working group divided the information they would like to see in the final tool into three thirds of priorities:
The group’s work also naturally focused on obtaining and storing information relating to each expert on the platform. While some of this information is already publicly available via national lists of experts or tools such as Findex, others can be communicated directly by the expert concerned, at the request of the person carrying out the search.
To ensure that the search algorithm did not favour any particular expert, it was also essential that the profiles provided by the tool according to the criteria chosen by the user were displayed in random order.
Based on these considerations, the working group reached a consensus on all the functions and specifications of the future IT tool. These specifications have been brought together in a “developer’s guide”, which will govern the services of the future technical service provider responsible for creating the tool.
A call for tenders is currently underway to begin the development of an initial prototype. This will be populated with a database of dummy expert profiles from the six pilot countries involved in the project (Belgium, France, Italy, Luxembourg, Poland, and Romania). It is this prototype that will be presented to the European Union, which is co-funding the project, before validation of a final and definitive version in February 2024.
This search engine project will ultimately be combined with the work of the other working groups involved in the other aspects of the Findex II project:
- on the criteria for registering legal experts on the lists of Member States, the assessment of experts, the management of lists of experts at national level,
- the establishment of a nomenclature of experts’ specialities at European level.
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