e-CODEX and the Italian Piloting

Experience
Marco Velicogna, IRSIG CNR
Marco.Velicogna@irsig.cnr.it

30 July 2015
IRSIG-CNR Working Paper
V. 1.0

1.   Introduction .......................................................................................................... 1  
2.   Methodological note............................................................................................. 2  
3.   e-CODEX ............................................................................................................. 3  
4.   The Italian piloting experience ............................................................................. 8  
4.1.   The Italian team ............................................................................................ 8  
4.2.   The Italian Pilots ........................................................................................... 8  
4.2.1.   e-Justice area Piloting ........................................................................... 9  
4.2.2.   Business Registers Piloting ................................................................. 12  
4.2.3.   Piloting supporting actions ................................................................... 13  
4.3.   More than just Piloting ................................................................................ 13  
5.   References ........................................................................................................ 14  

1. Introduction1
In the last 25 years, the introduction of ICT has been one of the main innovation drives
and one of the main challenges of Justice systems all around the world. The idea is
that, when properly linked to the automation and redesign of court procedures and
practices, and when properly used to support the communication between courts and
parties, 2 “ICT can be used to enhance efficiency, access, timeliness, transparency and
accountability, thus helping the judiciaries to provide adequate services”. 3 In many
countries, “statutory reforms have been introduced to allow the use and the exchange

1
The author wishes to thank Francesco Contini, Giulio Borsari, Ernst Steigenga, Andrea Resca
and Stefano Mardegan for the useful suggestions and comments in the making of this paper.
The author also wish to thank all other participants of e-CODEX projects without whom not only
it would be impossible to understand the multiple emergent components and faces of e-
CODEX, but e-CODEX would not have existed as it is, if not at all.
2
Velicogna, M. (2008). Use of information and communication technologies (ICT) in European
judicial systems. Council of Europe Publ. pp. 31-45; see also Velicogna, M., Errera, A., &
Derlange, S. (2011). e-Justice in France: the e-Barreau experience. Utrecht Law Review, 7(1),
163-187; Velicogna, M., Errera, A., & Derlange, S. (2013). Building e-Justice in Continental
Europe: The TéléRecours Experience in France. Utrecht L. Rev., 9, 38; Lupo, G., & Bailey, J.
(2014). Designing and Implementing e-Justice Systems: Some Lessons Learned from EU and
Canadian Examples. Laws, 3(2), 353-387.
3
Velicogna, M. (2008). Use of information and communication technologies (ICT) in European
judicial systems. Council of Europe Publ., p.6

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Working Paper V. 1.0 1

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of electronic data and documents within national judicial systems” 4 and ICT
infrastructures, applications and services have been introduced.5 The e-CODEX project
can be conceived as the next step, created to interconnect and make interoperable the
e-justice systems developed so far within Europe and to allow the cross-border
provision of e-Justice services.
After a short methodological introduction, this paper provides a general overview of e-
CODEX project, of the infrastructure it developed and presents the Italian e-CODEX
Piloting Experience. e-CODEX is a EU co-funded project aiming to build a
communication infrastructure for the cross-border exchange in the legal domain. The
paper is structured in two parts. First of all, it provides an introduction to the e-CODEX
project, the infrastructure it built and the services it is piloting. Follows a description of
the Italian experience, including the Italian team, the actual piloting experience and a
glimpse to the many other activities carried out by Italy within the project.

2. Methodological note
The present case study has been drafted as a result of my direct involvement in the e-
CODEX project, starting from its very beginning. The first operative meeting of the
project, which laid the basis of the high level architecture design strategy and for the
discussion on how to look for workable use cases, was hosted at my institute (IRSIG-
CNR) in January 2011. Afterwards, for the next almost five years, I’ve been involved in
the project assisting the Italian Ministry of Justice, which coordinates the project’s ‘High
Level Architecture’ Working Party, taking part in Piloting, Technical, Legal
Sustainability discussions and meetings, in Management Board activities and in the
project General Assemblies. This involvement has allowed the on-going participant
observation of the project evolution from a very central perspective, and the study of
how “things change[d] over time”.6 The natural outcome has been a very detailed data
collection and a consequent decision to build a case study upon it.
Furthermore, the case study methodology 7 is a very effective way to study the
emerging large scale ICT phenomenon in the justice sector,8 where what is needed is a
theoretical understanding of what is taking place, more than a merely technical or
statistical description.9 This is particularly true as the object of the study is a new
phenomenon which is characterized by few but highly relevant cases, decisions and
events. In general case studies are the preferred strategy when ‘how’, ‘who’ or ‘in
which way’ questions are being dealt with, when the researcher/author has little control
over events, and when the focus is on a contemporary phenomenon within some real-

4
Velicogna, M. (2007). Justice Systems and ICT-What Can Be Learned from Europe. Utrecht L.
Rev., 3, p.129.
5
Contini, F., & Lanzara, G. F. (eds.)(2014). The Circulation of Agency in E-Justice. Springer
Netherlands; Contini, F., & Lanzara, G. F. (eds.)(2008). ICT and innovation in the public sector:
European studies in the making of e-government. Palgrave Macmillan.
6
Pettigrew, A. M. (1997). What is a processual analysis?. Scandinavian journal of
management, 13(4), 337-348.
7
Yin, R. K. (1981). The case study crisis: Some answers. Administrative science quarterly, 58-
65; Benbasat, I., Goldstein, D. K., & Mead, M. (1987). The case research strategy in studies of
information systems. MIS quarterly, 369-386; Stuart, I., McCutcheon, D., Handfield, R.,
McLachlin, R., & Samson, D. (2002). Effective case research in operations management: a
process perspective. Journal of Operations Management, 20(5), 419-433.
8
Rosa, J., Teixeira, C., & Pinto, J. S. (2013). Risk factors in e-justice information systems.
Government Information Quarterly, 30(3), 241-256; Velicogna, M. (2007). Use of information
and communication technologies (ICT) in European judicial systems. Council of Europe Publ.
9
Glaser, B. G., & Strauss, A. L. (2009). The discovery of grounded theory: Strategies for
qualitative research. Transaction Publishers; Strauss, A. L., & Corbin, J. M. (1990). Basics of
qualitative research (Vol. 15). Newbury Park, CA: Sage.

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life context. 10 These elements characterize the investigation of large scale ICT
innovation in general, and of e-CODEX in particular. Furthermore, the in-depth case
study methodology allows the use of an interdisciplinary approach, which is particularly
relevant in an area where multiple factors (such as legal, institutional, technological
and practical) are deeply intertwined.11 Multiple methods of data collection have also
been employed, including the analysis of the relevant documentation developed by the
project (project deliverables, internal reports, meeting minutes), longitudinal and
participant observation of the project development, formal and informal interview with
key actors. These activities have been carried out throughout the whole length of the
project.

3. e-CODEX12
e-CODEX is several things: an EU co-funded project, an e-Delivery solution to
exchange semantically interoperable data and documents across legal domains, an e-
Identity cross border interoperability solution, and an information infrastructure based
on technology, organisational systems, rules and agreements to provide secure cross
border judicial services.

The e-CODEX project is a EU co-funded Large Scale Project (LSP) in the domain of
e-Justice. Its duration is 65 months running from Dec 2010 to May 2016 with 24m €
budget (EU contribution: €12m). 13 It involves 20 countries (soon to be 23), mainly
through their Ministries of Justice or their representatives, but also other institutions
such as the Council of Bars and Law Societies of Europe (CCBE), Council of the
Notariats of the European Union (CNUE), the National Research Council of Italy
(CNR), and OASIS. e-CODEX features in the Strategy on European e-Justice 2014 –
2018, which was endorsed by the Council of the European Union and the European
Parliament.
The e-CODEX Project aims to improve interoperability between legal authorities within
the EU, with minimum (originally null) impact on existing national ICT solutions. In this
context transport of data and documents is a key element of the solution. Any
functionality to be developed for a cross-border e-Justice service necessarily means
transport of information from one country to another. The technology is being piloted in
live use cases (i.e. with real parties and real cases). Use cases are divided between
civil justice and criminal justice.

Civil cases include:

• European Payment Order
• European Small Claim Procedure
• Business Registers.

Criminal cases include:

• Secure Cross-Border Exchange of Sensitive Judicial Data, covering:
o EURegio
o Mutual Legal Assistance

10
Yin, R. K. (2003). Case studies research: design and methods. Thousand Oaks, Sage.
11
Velicogna, M., Errera, A., & Derlange, S. (2011). e-Justice in France: the e-Barreau
experience. Utrecht Law Review, 7(1), 163-187.
12
Based on Velicogna, M. et al. (2014) e-CODEX Deliverable D7.4 Architectural Hands on
Material.
13
e-CODEX is funded through the ICT Policy Support Programme under the Competitiveness
and Innovation Framework Programme (CIP).

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 o European Arrest Warrant
o Financial Penalties applied to traffic offences
o Framework Decision 909 on Exchange of Prisoners

Civil pilots are already live for European Payment Order, and the go-live for the
European Small Claims procedure is planned for the second half of 2015. As of the
writing of this paper, July 2015, Criminal pilots are also being finalised and the
EURegio use case - part of the “exchange of sensitive data” use case - is in the final
testing phase14.

More specifically and from a technological perspective, e-CODEX is a multilateral,

content agnostic e-delivery infrastructure. For e-delivery infrastructure is intended an
infrastructure that receives and hands over (route and forward) data, documents -and
evidences of the main process steps- asynchronously. 15 e-CODEX infrastructure is
also content agnostic, in the sense that the transport of data is independent from the
format of the files being exchanged and from the business processes being
supported.16 Finally, it is multilateral, in the sense that common standards are agreed
by the partners to develop common solutions, instead of implementing bilateral
arrangements, which create the need for the maintenance of a higher number of
solutions and agreements.17
It uses building blocks from previous EU Large Scale Projects18 to support cross-border
e-Justice services. At the same time, this e-delivery infrastructure may be adapted for
more generalised use in the government sector within the EU Large Scale Project
called electronic Simplified European Networked services (e-SENS), aiming to deliver
reusable and tested technical components (building blocks) to the Connecting Europe
Facility (CEF).19
The e-CODEX architecture enables the interconnection of national systems by using
an industry standard (ebMS 3.0) for this electronic communication. The e-Delivery
solution is based on inter-gateway communication architecture, as well as a common
framework with a connector.20 The latter acts as a binding element between the cross
border transport solution provided by the gateways and the national transport solutions,
which deliver the exchanged data and documents to the national applications (national
service providers).21 A high level representation of the architecture is provided in Figure
1. From a technical perspective, the gateway is based on the open source software
“Holodeck”22, which is an ebMS23 based b2b messaging software according to the e-
14
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=icsac-TQlQQ
15
http://wiki.ds.unipi.gr/display/ESENS/SAT+-+e-Delivery
16
e-CODEX (2013) e-CODEX Deliverable 5.8 Reusable Assets V1.0 p. 31
17
Borsari, G. et al. (2011) e-CODEX Deliverable 7.1 “Governance and Guidelines Definition”.
18
PEPPOL: e-procurement, epSOS: e-health, STORK: e-identity and SPOCS: e-business
services. More information can be found here:

http://ec.europa.eu/information_society/newsroom/cf/document.cfm?action=display&doc_id=12
50
19
CEF project funded by the European Commission is devoted to stimulate and support projects
of common interest for the deployment and operation of digital service infrastructures. For more
information please see http://ec.europa.eu/digital-agenda/en/connecting-europe-facility.
20
“A communication is made up by a message producer and a message consumer, where
producer and consumer each connect independently to a e-Delivery eco-system. Access from
and to the eco-system by producer and consumer is handled by Messaging Gateways that
serve as Messaging Bridges”. http://wiki.ds.unipi.gr/display/ESENS/SAT+-+e-Delivery
21
e-CODEX (2015) “e-CODEX achievements, use cases and technical building blocks”
22
http://holodeck-b2b.sourceforge.net/

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Delivery concept. The Holodeck software has been extended to fit the e-CODEX and
e-Delivery convergence needs by providing both the DOMIBUS (DOMain
Interoperability BUS) Gateway and the DOMIBUS Connector Framework. The
Connector Framework is intended to map the (proprietary) national formats to the
widely used ebMS-based standard transport format used between the gateways.
Through this, e-CODEX ensures that the interconnection impacts the national systems
as little as possible and that the Connector framework implementation has a common
software base for all piloting partners. 24 Furthermore, e-CODEX Connectors and
Gateways support the translation of national standards of documentation to the e-
CODEX standard and back through mapping to ensure reliable transportation of the
data, thus allowing secure transportation of data between national Gateways.
Additionally, users are supposed be able to access the infrastructure through the EU e-
Justice portal.25

Figure 1 e-CODEX high-level architecture main components

The function of e-CODEX technical infrastructure is not limited to the transportation of

data and documents. To enable meaningful exchange of information between national
systems requires also semantic interoperability. Every Member State participating in
the pilots has national solutions for procedures in civil and criminal law (either existing
or developed in the context of e-CODEX). Such solutions are typically based on
domestic semantic structures. To support the exchange of semantic information, e-
CODEX uses of common document standards and semantics. Specific coding
schemas used by national systems needs to be transformed in order to be interpreted
by other systems using different schemas. This transformation is better known as

23
Electronic Business Message Service Specification
24
e-CODEX (2015) “e-CODEX achievements, use cases and technical building blocks”
25
For more information please see https://e-justice.europa.eu/home.do?action=home

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mapping. 26 To this end, “e-CODEX has to and will provide the means to connect
rightfully and meaningfully that data that is presented in a different format and may
carry different interpretations within in the Member States”. 27 Following a use-case
centric modelling approach, 28 for each use-case, with the support of national experts,
e-CODEX has developed specifications which ensures mutually equal interpretation of
data exchanged between national electronic systems in cross border legal procedures.
In practice, for being processed through e-CODEX, the national solutions need to be
converted into basic ‘European’ semantic concepts. Member States are responsible for
when, if and how the messages are transformed from European to national level and
vice versa. 29 The result is that the data being exchanged “is clearly and uniformly
understood when exchanged through the e-CODEX infrastructure".30
31
Figure 2 Basic semantic concepts from European Small Claims Procedure

In addition to an e-Delivery infrastructure and semantic, the e-Identity solution is a key

component of the e-CODEX architecture. Identity and indication of intention are
essential element in any interactions that a natural person or a legal entity has with the
other participants in legal proceedings (e.g. in the filing of a civil case from a claimant
to the court, the identity of the claimant and its will to file are key for the beginning of
the procedure). In the “physical world”, identity and indication of intention are often
shown through written signatures, identity documents and/or written mandates, which
authorise persons or institutions to act on behalf of the party entitled to take part in the

26
“Mapping is the common method to come to a solution to accept and adapt to the legacy of
IT-systems”. Francesconi E. et al. (2013) e-CODEX Deliverable 6.9 Concept for Implementation
of WP6 (update of D6.3) v2.2 p. 17
27
Francesconi E. et al. (2013) e-CODEX Deliverable 6.9 Concept for Implementation of WP6
(update of D6.3) v2.2 p.17
28
Ibidem p. 18
29
e-CODEX (2015) “e-CODEX achievements, use cases and technical building blocks”. e-
CODEX has defined a methodology to develop specifications to enable meaningful exchange of
data between electronic systems supporting legal procedures within a supra national context.
The methodology is sustained through the twofold long term strategy for semantic
interoperability in e-Justice. The first aim is to guarantee the correctness of the processing of
cross border legal procedures. The second aim is harmonising legal concepts to enable faster
deployment of these procedures.
30
Francesconi E. et al. (2013) e-CODEX Deliverable 6.9 Concept for Implementation of WP6
(update of D6.3) v2.2 p.17
31
e-CODEX (2015) “e-CODEX achievements, use cases and technical building blocks”

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procedure32. Moving to the digital world, electronic identities, electronic signatures and
electronic mandates all exist in some form in different e-CODEX Member States.
Recognising these identities and indications of intention, and being able to use them in
cross-border cases, though, is a complex matter.
Dealing with such topics, and in line with its subsidiary stance, e-CODEX project
decided to support secure electronic communication and information exchange
between the existing national solutions. Identity management systems, systems
supporting the indication of intention by identified users and signature verification
solutions already in place in the different Member States are made interoperable cross-
border through a mechanism of validation of the signature/identification that works at
the level of the sender’s connector and which crates a certification signed by the
sending connector authority (i.e. the Ministry of Justice of the sending MS), the so
called Trust-Ok-Token. 33

Figure 3 e-Codex technological components

In addition to technological components, e-CODEX is also composed of organisations,

rules and agreements that allow the actual provision of cross border judicial services.
Being the legal domain, first of all, procedural rules (laws) are required. e-CODEX
services follow cross-border judicial procedures based on EU Regulations and
Decisions (e.g. European Payment Order, European Small Claim etc.). While these EU
norms provide a certain level of standardisation, their functioning relies on national
organisations (e.g. courts, bailiffs, tax agencies), procedures (e.g. notification, payment
of fees), as well as technologies and specific frameworks (e.g. e-identification, e-

32
Contini, F. and R. Mohr (2014). How the Law Can Make It Simple: Easing the Circulation of
Agency in e-Justice, in F. Contini and G.F. Lanzara (eds), The Circulation of Agency in E-
Justice. Interoperability and Infrastructures for European Transborder Judicial Proceedings:
Springer Netherlands, pp. 53-79.
Mohr, R. and F. Contini (2011). Reassembling the legal. ʻThe Wonders of Modern Scienceʼ in
Court-Related Proceedings, Griffith Law Review - Special Symposium: The Laws of Technology
and the Technology of Law, 20, 994-1019.
33
e-CODEX (2015) “e-CODEX achievements, use cases and technical building blocks”

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signature etc.). When electronic communication crosses national borders, mutual trust
and acceptance of the national systems that manage such communication is needed.
To support this, the e-CODEX project has drafted an agreement called the Circle of
Trust, signed by all piloting partners. This established a firm basis to recognise
exchanged electronic information. The Circle of Trust also establishes the minimum
level of operational and technical requirements the partners need to satisfy to be
connected to the e-CODEX system and provide services through it. One of the key
concepts supported by the Circle of Trust is that if the information is trusted by the
state where it originates from, then it may also be trusted by the receiving state/s,
subject to certain conditions. A Circle of Trust is understood as the mutual recognition
between Member States of electronic data, documents and signatures within the
existing legal framework. 34

4. The Italian piloting experience

4.1. The Italian team
Italy is actively participating to e-CODEX project through three organizations: the Italian
Ministry of Justice (MoJ), the National Research Council of Italy (through the Research
Institute on Judicial Systems IRSIG-CNR and the Institute on Legal Information Theory
and Techniques ITTIG-CNR) and Infocamere. These organizations provide the
institutional, organizational, technical and legal competences needed to fully cooperate
with other e-CODEX partners and to implement and pilot the use cases Italy.
In addition, the Milan First Instance Court of General Jurisdiction and Chambers of
Commerce of Trieste and Venice are actively supporting the pilots and their
preparation and several other Italian Courts and BAR associations are collaborating in
the needed data collection on the actual implementation of the EU cross border
procedures.

4.2. The Italian Pilots

One of the reasons of this plurality of Italian partners is the Italian institutional setting
in relation to the potential use cases. In fact, while most of the e-CODEX project use
cases fall under the competence of the Italian Ministry of Justice, the Business
registers use case fall under the competence of the Italian Chambers of Commerce
and of InfoCamere, their ICT consortium.

This results in Italy being the first bed-test for the Multi-Domain potential of e-CODEX
infrastructure, anticipating e-SENS project experience.

34
Velicogna, M. et al. (2014) e-CODEX Deliverable D7.4 Architectural Hands on Material, pp32-
33

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Figure 4 Italian e-CODEX Infrastructure (source: Borsari, G. et al., 2015, e-CODEX Y3 review
meeting Piloting Country Feedback - Italy)

4.2.1. e-Justice area Piloting

The Italian Ministry of Justice, on the basis of the analysis carried out both at e-CODEX
level, both at national level to assess the feasibility within the Italian context of potential
cases, decided to pilot in the civil justice area developing an infrastructure which allows
the justice administration to exchange cross-border communications through e-CODEX
infrastructure. The decision to pilot in this area was linked to the existence of a flexible
national solution called Processo Civile Telematico (Civil Trial On-Line), which was
already in place in the First Instance Courts of General Jurisdiction.
Up to now, participation of other Italian parties (i.e. lawyers, businesses, citizens and
foreign citizens resident in Italy) to e-CODEX is delegated to the e-Justice Portal. At
the same time, ways to support the development of components for the connection of
legal professional software (e.g. lawyers and notaries applications) are being
investigated in collaboration with the other e-CODEX partners.
Within the pilot preparation, e-CODEX Italian Justice Gateway and Connector have
been installed and tested both as test environment (connected to a test court and used
to simulate the functioning of the system) and as production system linked to the real
courts (dealing with real cases). The Italian Court software has also been upgraded to
integrate the management of European Payment Orders (EPO) procedure and allow
judges and court clerks to access and work on the case documents and data through
their usual interface and applications.
At present, the European Small Claim Procedure (ESCP) is not being implemented.
This decision derives from the maximum value of an ESCP, 2000 euros, which means
it is of competence of the Justices of the Peace. Piloting of ESCP will be possible only
when the Civil Trial On-Line will be implemented in these offices.

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Since 2013 the Court of Milan is enabled, as piloting court, to receive EPO from other
European Union countries (currently Austria and Estonia) via e-CODEX.

Figure 5 Basic flow of the EPO communication exchange (source: Borsari, G. and Velicogna, M.,
2015, e-CODEX Y3 review meeting WP7 presentation)

Aside from minor issues related to the introduction of a new system, the procedure is
working smoothly from a technical and organizational perspective.

Figure 6 Clerk working on an EPO case through his office application (source: Borsari, G. et al.,
2015, e-CODEX Y3 review meeting Piloting Country Feedback - Italy)

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Figure 7 Italian judge receiving an EPO through his usual working application (source: Borsari, G.
et al., 2015, e-CODEX Y3 review meeting Piloting Country Feedback - Italy)

Figure 8 Screenshot of an EPO form A in the judge working application (source: Borsari, G. et al.,
2015, e-CODEX Y3 review meeting Piloting Country Feedback - Italy)

Issues lay in the complexities not addressed by e-CODEX infrastructure, and more
in detail: a) determining the competent court in Italy, b) payment of court fees, and c)

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translations; these issues contribute to the low number of cases and the high level of
judges’ decisions against the claimant (e.g. because the court is not competent or the
open text fields of the EPO form are not in the language accepted by the court).

At the same time, it is important to mention that e-CODEX is addressing a number of

issues that are not strictly related to the technological component of the procedure. It is
the case of the communication needs between Italian courts and parties that are not
addressed by the forms provided by the EPO regulation. Here is the list of
communications not foreseen in the EPO forms but which are key for the smooth
functioning of the procedure and which are going to be implemented through the EPO
Open Form in e-CODEX:
1. Communication from the Court to the claimant informing the latter that the claim
has been received and has been registered under a specific number of
protocol.
2. Communication from the Court to the claimant informing the claimant on the
need for the payment of Court fees and the possible modalities to do it.
3. Communication from the claimant to the Court informing the Court on the
payment of Court fees.
4. Communication from the Court to the claimant informing the latter that the order
for payment has been issued and that a certified copy of the order can be
issued on the basis of a request of the claimant and the payment of a specific
Court fee.
5. Communication from the claimant to the Court in which the former asks to the
latter for a certified copy of the order.
6. Communication from the Court to the claimant in which the former informs the
latter that a certified copy of the order is ready, under the condition of the
payment of a specific Court fee (the claimant is supposed to pay the Court fee,
is supposed to take the certified copy and is supposed to serve it upon the
debtor through a bailiff)
7. Communication from the claimant to the Court asking for the issue of a Form G.
8. Communication from the Court to the claimant that the Form G is ready.
9. Communication from the claimant to the Court informing that, after the service
of the order, debtor has paid the debt, in order to avoid that a registration tax is
applied over the order.

4.2.2. Business Registers Piloting

InfoCamere joined e-Codex during the third year of the project, in order to allow the
piloting in Italy of e-CODEX Interconnection of Business Registers use case, which
deals with cross-border mergers. 35 As the Italian Business Registers domain is
separated from the justice one, an independent access point to the e-CODEX
infrastructure was set up (i.e. Gateway and Connector). This gave the opportunity to
test the infrastructure adoption by a ‘newcomer Country’, as to say as one of the
countries that joined the project after its first project extension.

35
The procedure concerns the notification from a EU Member State’s business register of a
dissolving company due to a merger taking effect to a second Member Stare’s business register
and the reply from the second Member State’s business register confirming the receipt of the
notification (Velicogna, M. et al., 2014, e-CODEX Deliverable D7.4 Architectural Hands on
Material).

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At the same time, the presence and support of experienced national partners allowed
InfoCamere to be quickly introduced to the project. Furthermore, compared to the first
wave of piloting countries, the Central Testing Platform developed by the Greek
partners to support the testing of Gateways and Connectors speeded up national tests
and GW/CON readiness for integration tests.
The Chambers of Commerce of Trieste and Venice have been engaged for piloting e-
Codex, at the same time, the solution developed by InfoCamere is designed to host
new Chambers with a “plug-and-play” approach. To support the future engagement
from the Chamber system, InfoCamere presented the Business Register pilot during
the e-Justice conference in Rome in 2014. At the beginning of 2015 the system is in
the end-to-end test phase, and the go-live is expected in the second half of 2015

4.2.3. Piloting supporting actions

Another advantage of the plurality of Italian partners is the mix of competences, which
can be fielded when the situation requires it. An example of the strength deriving from
the plurality of competences of the Italian team is in the preliminary research carried
out by the Italian Ministry of Justice, in cooperation with IRSIG-CNR in preparation of
the first wave of piloting of the EPO and to assess the opportunity to pilot the ESCP at
a later stage of the project. Both EPO and ESC procedures are based on Council
Regulations, which provide common rules for all Member States. At the same time,
thanks to previous researches carried out by IRSIG-CNR (in particular the BIECPO
project36), it was known that many details are left to the Member States’ procedural
laws, local interpretations and organization. This results in a variety of problems that
parties and seized courts must confront to carry out the procedures. These problems
may hinder the piloting of e-CODEX.
To proactively confront such problems, the Italian Ministry of Justice and IRSIG-CNR
collected data on the actual functioning of the paper based procedure in the potential
piloting locations and in other control locations. Both Italian court personnel and
lawyers with concrete experience on EPO and ESCP were involved to understand how
they concretely handle such procedures and which problems they face. The
investigation was carried out through several methods, including open interviews, focus
groups, simulations and real case analysis from trained researchers.
This work helped identifying and addressing such issues. For example, how to facilitate
the payment of court fees that in the Italian case is very difficult for someone who is
filing a case from abroad.

Another example of piloting support action has been the testing of e-CODEX user
handbook. Two group of potential users, one with previous knowledge of e-CODEX,
the other without, have been asked to read the document and experiment for whatever
possible at the present stage the electronic procedures enabled by e-CODEX. The
results were collected and discussed by a focus group with the two groups and IRSIG-
CNR researchers. This allowed providing concrete and Italian user oriented feedback
to the e-CODEX partners working on the document.

4.3. More than just Piloting

While this presentation focuses piloting, it is worth mentioning that Italy is strongly
supporting e-CODEX on several other points and in particular:

36
Building Interoperability for European Civil Proceedings Online (BIECPO’) EU co-funded
project http://www.irsig.cnr.it/biecpo

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 • e-CODEX WP7 Architecture coordination by the Italian Ministry of justice
• Key focus on e-CODEX in the e-Justice Conference of Rome
• Contribution to e-CODEX semantic work (WP6) through the research
competences of ITTIG-CNR and its research network in this specific field.
• Contribution to the communication of e-CODEX effort and results to the
International Community (e.g. presentations in Canada, Australia, …) and
Research Community (through a number of scientific publications)
• Supporting the sustainability of e-CODEX through JHA council conclusions
during the Italian Presidency of the EU. As one of the key non-Italian e-
CODEX participant commented on the topic, ‘Politically this is the most
important if not impressive part of the Italian participation in e-CODEX.
Technically all Italian contributions have been good, but the sustainability
makes e-CODEX really count’.

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