Adobe Success Story

Ready for innovation
The Court of Cremona is an efficient unit of the Italian legal system. 14 judges and 50 employees work at the court which assembles about 7 times a week, tackling 12 to 13 criminal trials each time.

The Court of Cremona has been using computer technology for quite some time, following guidelines from the Digital Administration Code. Efficiency and speed have inspired several projects including the conversion of documents to digital format done in collaboration with Adobe. For the past several years, all papers related to pre-trial conferences have been available in Adobe Portable Document Format (PDF). Starting recently, all court papers associated with a trial are available in digital format only.

Benefits

• Anticipated savings of over €1 million in three years
• Improved staff and citizen engagement in legal processes
• Helped accelerate time to conduct trials
• Minimized travel requirements for staff and citizens
• Adopted easily deployed and easily maintained solutions

Project Details

Today, the Court of Cremona is further reducing the costs associated with running trials through the use of Adobe Connect software. Thanks to Adobe Connect, judges, lawyers, detainees, and witnesses can now participate in a trial without being physically present in the courtroom.

Commitment to excellence
The Court of Cremona is one of the Courts within the District of Tribunale di Brescia. Its District Representative is Pierpaolo Beluzzi. Strong commitment to innovation led Beluzzi to envision a system that allows participants in a trial to communicate with each other through the use of web technology, thus making the process more efficient, more cost effective, and better organized.

Article 391 of the Italian Code of Criminal Procedure establishes that, “a validation trial must take place in the jury room, and the participation of the defendant is mandatory.” However, it turns out that participation can be remote.

The resulting Project Digital Connect grew out of the collaboration between several organizations, including the Court of Cremona, Adobe, Aemcom, Cesvin, the Politecnico Foundation, and Cremona’s branch of Politecnico of Milan.

“The video-based trial system we developed using Adobe technology eliminates physical distance, as well as reduces costs and delays associated with transferring detainees, lawyers, witnesses, judges, and the court chancellor,” says Beluzzi. “Web conferencing and collaborative features of the system bring together remote parties securely. Hardware requirements are minimal, needing only a computer with broadband Internet access and equipped with a webcam and a microphone. The ability to hold a trial with virtual participation of all the parties greatly improves citizen perception of the justice system in Italy.”

A secure, virtual experience
Still in its experimental phase, the web conferencing-based trial system is currently used in one courtroom at the Court of Cremona, which has been equipped with five workstations connected to the Internet through optical cables. Each participant in a trial can be physically present in the room. Or, he could be in his office, at home, or even in prison, and communicate with the others through one of the workstations.

The web conference-based trial takes place as follows: a virtual room is created and e-mails are sent to invite participants. Participants access a specified URL to enter the virtual room. A judge or the court chancellor will then start the trial by enabling the transmission of video and sound. In the virtual room, the chancellor maps a component of the desktop to each trial participant so that participants can interact with each other according to policies assigned to their roles.

“It is important to note that our solution based on Adobe software and technology was implemented without any customization,” says Beluzzi.

Safeguarding rights, streamlining processes
The Digital Connect project aims at streamlining the activities of all the parties involved in a trial. Judges and chancellors save time because they no longer need to leave the court. Lawyers also reap benefits: the system helps them provide highly professional services through a technology that sets few rules to achieve great goals—and always protects individual constitutional rights.

In addition to supporting dynamic web conferences with streaming audio and video, Adobe solutions deliver other benefits to the Digital Connect project. For instance, the court can store court papers for each trial in Adobe PDF; plus staff can handle documents remotely and securely via digital signature authentication.

These capabilities are handled by Adobe LiveCycle solutions to address the need to assign policy controls to protect documents.

“These features are critical,” says Beluzzi. “A trial transcript can be shared among participants, downloaded, digitally signed just as if participants were physically next to each other. In addition, the transcript goes through a workflow and is automatically added to the remaining court papers.”

The project is the result of a productive collaboration with Adobe. First electronic court papers, then web conferencing-based court trials give the Italian justice system a new image: fast, efficient, and on time.

“By collaborating with Adobe and using products such as Adobe Policy Server, Adobe LiveCycle Workflow, and Adobe Connect, the court is designing a powerful system that can be replicated in other areas without customization,” says Beluzzi. “This is important because it allows the Court of Cremona to achieve great results with limited efforts, without developing ad hoc software.”

The Court has documented the excellent cost benefits of the system. The total cost of training and traveling for detainees and lawyers is about €467,000 a year. Using Digital Connect to perform trials and to train employees could save the Court over €1 million in three years.

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