Digitizing judicial
services for a greater accessibility and transparency of justice in
Mexico

The legal system in Mexico suffers from a lack of transparency and fairness that harms the most vulnerable workers. They struggle to assert their rights with their employers as they lack the money or network to move forward. Two thirds of people dismissed do not receive the compensation they are legally entitled to, and less than 10% of them take legal action to obtain compensation (Castellanos et al., 2020). Workers in insecure or unregulated jobs are most at risk. This is mainly due to only having limited access to qualified legal professionals and lack of transparency in a system known to experience long delays and corruption.

From 2015, Mexico initiated a major overhaul of labor court operation to address these inequalities. A 2017 constitutional amendment ended the labor dispute resolution bodies (Juntas de Conciliación y Arbitraje) deemed to be inefficient and lacking transparency. Following a new federal labor law in 2019, the new organization was gradually implemented between the end of 2020 and 2023. This is based on a new conciliation step in labor disputes managed by independent centers, which is mandatory before a case is brought to court.

The transition between systems means the labor justice ecosystem in Mexico is dealing with challenges in operations, coordination and quality. This impacts proper labor dispute management, and the complainants' experience. Complications are seen regularly at three key moments in the process:

• The time the legal authority gives the employer the proper notice. An elevated number of hearings are canceled for lack of proper notice;
• Receipt and review of the initial complaint written by the complainants, which is often incomplete and noncompliant;
• The workers' choice of legal representation. Many cases are picked up by an informal network of unethical lawyers who take advantage of complainants' not fully knowing their rights to steer them towards costly and often inappropriate services.

The Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo de México (ITAM) is directing the project in partnership with the Labor Court in Mexico City for its implementation. It aims to use digital solutions for smoother running legal services so that corruption and the cost of accessing the legal system are reduced.

Four components have been developed and tested for the proposed innovation in the context of the legal system overhaul:

• SIGNO: an app will automate the process of sending out summons and notices for legal proceedings to parties and make it more secure. Tracking each stage of the notice procedure will reduce the risks of it being manipulated and make tracking more reliable and seamless. The ITAM team had already developed it, and FID funding allowed impact assessment of the timeframe and notice rate, as well as how staff used it, due to the tool's increased tracking ability.
• SEDEL: an online tool that provides step-by-step guidance for workers or their legal representatives in writing up their complaint, to ensure that it meets all filing requirements from the start. It tackles the frequently encountered issue of poorly drafted case files slowing down the procedure, especially for wrongful termination which makes up more than 90% of submissions. All the functions developed for this tool were funded by FID.
• An information campaign and legal assistance when workers come to the conciliation center for the first time. This improves how much information they have at the critical time of starting the procedure and guides them in their conciliation decisions. The assessment tests various information delivery formats: a standalone video, a video followed by a discussion with a legal expert, or a video supported by an AI-based legal assistant, to measure the campaign's impact on workers' understanding of the process, their rights and available legal options, and to inform their decision-making.
• PROLAB: a platform for workers who have not reached a settlement agreement to search for, compare and assess lawyers specialized in labor law. By making past results achieved by professionals visible it aims to improve choice of legal representation for workers, who are often solicited by unlicensed intermediaries lacking qualifications.

FID funding allowed all of these solutions to be developed and three of them tested using randomized control tests (RMT)—the notice management app, the information campaign and the platform putting workers in contact with skilled lawyers—, to measure cause-and-effect relationships between each innovation and legal system access improvement, and produce evidence of impact.