Seven years after the start of the procedure, the doctrine.Fr platform is sentenced to “illegal collection of judicial decisions” and to have a competitive advantage by illegal means.
The new company that is presented as a “legal AI” intends “to relieve lawyers and lawyers of repetitive tasks and chronophagatic analysis of the file.” To do this, he had recovered 1.6 million decisions from the administrative courts, 3 million decisions of commercial courts and thousands of first instance decisions that resulted in particular from Pontoise, Toulouse, Nanterre and Paris.
It provides a search engine using artificial intelligence to build the requested results.
Decisions put online without authorization
But this collection was considered illegal at several points by the Court of Appeals of Paris, for whom Ferseti, the company behind doctrine.f, “acts committed of unfair competition”.
The platform that became American in 2023, which is carried by powerful investors, including Xavier Niel and Famili, had been the subject of complaints emanating from their competitors such as Dalloz, Lexbase, Lexisnexis, Lexisne and Lamy Liaisons.
Therefore, Doctrine.fr is convicted of paying between 40,000 and 50,000 euros to each of the plaintiffs “in compensation for the damage suffered by unfair competition” writes the Court, which did not consider that the platform was guilty of deceptive commercial practices or parasitism. You will also have to show the trial for at least 60 days on your home page.
A “hammer victory” for both fields
Therefore, it is a semi -Victory for some, and a semi defeat for the other, especially because the Paris Court of Appeals judged that there were “serious, precise and concordant presumptions that the Ferseti company obtained hundreds of thousands of judicial decisions of the courts of first instance, without any authorization of the directors of the transplants.”
During the long years of procedures, it has been shown that doctrine.fr had never received an authorization to recover these documents, which can, for some, include confidential data “in violation of the provisions of the Data Protection Law and the Judicial Organization Code.”
The 2017 advertising campaign around the “7 million decisions” available in doctrine.fr in front of its competitors characterizes, according to the Court “unfair competition”.
The plaintiffs welcome a “legal victory (which) is an ethical victory.”
On the side of doctrine.fr/forseti, we say “relieved” in a press release, which, however, denounces the conviction for “speeding” in its collection. The platform also indicates that the amount of “painless” damage does not prevent it from operating and states that it remains “100% accessible.” No appeal will be formed.
Source: BFM TV
