Digitalizing the commercial courts: between promises and pitfalls

Various authors have been conceiving digitalization as a way to modernize justice and improve legal issues, i.e. address delays, increase legal security, and make justice cheaper and accessible for all. Such normative and techno-determinist discourse has justified several central and integrated projects carried out in Belgium since 1998, which successively failed one after the other. In 2015, the former Minister of Justice changed his strategy: his plan called for the cooperation of legal professions, and for their enrolment in the design, development and implementation of digital tools. This is how the Central Solvency Register, named RegSol – or the Register –, was designed, developed and launched within the Commercial Courts in April 2017. The enrolment of legal professions seemed to be the solution to finally “modernize” the Belgian justice system after twenty years of trying. RegSol was supposed to make justice faster, more accessible and transparent. In this article, we show how and why most of these promises have not – yet – been fully met. Our research draws on two case studies conducted in a big (Alpha) and in a small (Delta) commercial court between November 2021 and February 2022. It shows that the various obstacles identified in the design and development phases hindered, to a certain extent, the platform’s potential to make justice more efficient and accessible. Everyday reality for court practitioners is not yet fully in line with the political promises. RegSol’s impact remains ambiguous: while simplifying tracking processes and centralizing information, it also entails new challenges.