Legal open data is the movement to make legal-sector public data freely available and reusable: court decisions, legislation and regulations, parliamentary records, public reports. In France, this movement rests on two foundational texts: the Digital Republic Act (2016), which establishes the principle of openness by default for public data, and the law of 7 October 2021, which organizes the gradual opening of all court decisions.
Decisions are anonymized by the Cour de cassation (for the judicial courts) and the Conseil d'État (for the administrative courts), which safeguard litigants' personal data while guaranteeing access to legal information. This data directly feeds predictive justice and Legal Analytics tools, enabling lawyers and legal professionals to analyze case-law trends at scale.
The Legal Data Space project aims to build a sovereign legal-data infrastructure, ensuring its quality, interoperability and accessibility within a GDPR-compliant framework. Legal open data is a cornerstone of French GovTech and legaltech, and its development shapes the sector's ability to innovate while preserving citizens' fundamental rights.