COVL Central Department for Enforcement on the basis of Authentic Document

1. COVLCentral Department for Enforcement on the basis of Authentic Document Vesna Pavlič Pivk President of Local Court of Ljubljana district court judge

2. Court backlogs, especially those related to the enforcement of monetary claims, were one of the acute problems of the Slovenian legal sistem up until 2008. Prior to that, 44 different local courts were responsible for enforcement on the basis of their territorial jurisdiction, work invloved approximately 350 employees.

3. Procedure: paper based Computer system: only for basic case management no connectivity Average time to issue a decision: more than 6 months practises among different courts varied greatly Efect: long procedures inefficiciency and unpredictability burden for the economy low confidence in the judiciary

4. Central Department for Enforcement on the basis of Authentic Document (COVL) began its operations on January 1, 2008 as part of the Local Court in Ljubljana. It was developed on the basis of a project led by the Registry Department of the Supreme Court of Slovenia that lasted from 2004 to 2008.

5. Strategic goal of the project: to reduce judicial backlogs to inprove the efficiency of courts in enforcement procedures WHY autentic documents*? Because they represented three quarters of all enforcement-related backlog, and the procedure had significant automation potential because legislation clearly enumerated and defined the types and structure of the recognized authentic documents, as well as the elements of such a document. * a generic term for a number of classes of monetary claims which includes invoices, bills of exchange, cheques, etc.

6. Components of the project: legislative changes organizational solutions technological solutions

7. Legislative changes have: allowed e-filing and e-file management in civil procedures, abolished the need to submit documentation or sign electronic claims, permitted automatization of the procedure up to the phase of serving the decision which allows enforcement.

8. Organizational solutions were additionally aimed at reducing human factor at routine tasks. COVL was given exclusive jurisdiction over such cases, thus involving only one eighth of the previous personnel, and reducing the number of judges dealing with these cases from more than 50 to only 4. A number of tasks, such as printing and scanning was outsourced to contractors, and the procedure up to the point of sending out the decision on the enforcement claim was made practically paperless.

9. Technological solutions were developed by the Center for Informatics at the Supreme Court, and were based on its strategic technological guidelines, such as uniform architecture, modularity, reusability, interoperability, vendor neutrality and independence, and most importantly – use of open standards.

10. Statistics: Despite such increases COVL maintained its productivity and efficiency.

11. E-Claims and paper form:

12. The goal of the project was to issue the decision within 2 days after the receipt of the claim in the information system. Percentage of all decisions issued within 2 days: 2008 33 % 2009 68 % 2010 54,7 % 2011 65,04 % and 84,26 % within 5 days

13. Conclusions: COVL could serve as a model for pan-European enforcement procedures. It already allows filing of claims by foreigners, as it does not discriminate between any nationality of the creditor, but its jurisdiction is obviously limited to debtor's property in Slovenia. User interface is currently only in Slovenian language, but the system could relatively easily be adapted to enable filing in other languages as well, thus facilitating creditors from EU or any other countries to make claims directly.

14. THANK YOU FOR YOUR ATTENTION.