Digitalisation of Civil Proceedings: From the Automation of Court Procedures to the Transformation of Procedural Form

The relevance of the topic is determined by the fact that the integration of digital technologies into civil justice has gone beyond the technical support of court operations and has begun to change the procedural form, the position of the participants in a case and the ways in which the court performs its functions, while the conceptual apparatus describing these changes remains unsettled in legislation, judicial practice and legal doctrine. The purpose of the article is to conceptualise the notion of digitalisation of civil proceedings by clarifying its correlation with related categories and determining the legal nature of this phenomenon and its place in the system of civil procedure. Achieving this purpose became possible through the use of a set of methods of scientific cognition, in particular the dialectical, formal legal, comparative legal, systemic structural methods and the method of functional analysis. The article substantiates the distinction between digitisation as an operational and technical level of change and digitalisation as a systemic level of transformation of the procedural form, with the caveat that this distinction is methodologically conditional, since both phenomena are in a relationship of successive development and mutual conditioning. It is clarified that e-justice captures the instrumental and service related state of the judicial system, whereas digitalisation indicates the dynamics of integrating digital tools into the procedural form. The author proposes a definition of the digitalisation of civil proceedings as a normatively regulated process of integrating digital technologies into the civil procedural form, within which procedural actions are performed by digital means and produce the procedural consequences prescribed by law, while their digital form ensures the proper exercise of procedural rights and the guarantees of a fair trial, and reveals four main features of this notion. The article argues for the qualification of digitalisation as a complex normative and functional phenomenon, characterises its cross-cutting nature within the system of civil procedure and outlines the directions for further systematisation of the forms of digital transformation of procedural activity.