Projects

POLINE

Principles Of Law In National and European VAT

The POLINE project is co-financed by the European Union’s Justice Programme and is implemented by APIS in partnership with leading European universities. The project aims to create an AI-powered tool to retrieve and analyze judicial principles of law within the context of Value Added Tax case-law of the Court of Justice of the European Union and the supreme courts of Italy, Sweden and Bulgaria. The tool features a legal database, visualization of links between principles and a module for detecting relevant legal principles. It uses AI, machine learning and natural language processing to extract and cluster judicial principles, detect similarities and perform network analysis. The development involves a multidisciplinary approach, combining legal theory, legal informatics and AI technologies.

FACILEX

Exploring relevant mutual recognition mechanisms in the criminal matter

After the successful implementation of the CrossJustice project in 2022, APIS Europe continues its cooperation with the University of Bologna and five other European academic institutions within the framework of the FACILEX project, which is being implemented again with the financial support of the European Commission. The results of the CrossJustice project will be used as a basis for the new FACILEX project.

The CrossJustice online platform will be expanded with new content as well as new functionalities based on the latest digital technologies.

The multinational team of experts will examine how mutual recognition mechanisms in the field of judicial cooperation in criminal matters in the EU (European arrest warrant, European investigation order, mutual recognition of freezing orders and confiscation orders) are implemented in nine Member States.

The upgraded version of the platform will provide legal practitioners with:

• free access to EU and national legislation and case law on criminal matters;
• a comparative review of the national legislation of the Member States in the subject areas and highlighting the gaps in the transposition of the EU legislation;
• a personalised legal assessment, taking into account the specific facts of the case.

ADELE

Analytics for DEcision of LEgal cases

The ADELE project is co-financed by the European Union’s Justice Programme and is implemented in partnership between European universities and three Bulgarian organisations. The aim of the partners is to create a pilot tool based on the methods of artificial intelligence, to analyse the decisions of national courts and to predict the outcome of litigation in certain areas of law.

Such an innovative approach to the processing of legal information aims to support the work of legal practitioners and contribute to reducing the workload of the courts.

As part of the project tasks, a pilot tool is developed that offers users, along with the familiar functionalities of legal information systems, additional features such as: automatic extraction of keywords and arguments from court decisions, automatically generated summaries of court decisions, predicting outcomes of legal cases, extracting decisions with similar judicial arguments and more.

CrossJustice

Knowledge, Advisory and Capacity Building Information tool for Criminal Procedural Rights in Judicial Cooperation

CrossJustice project is co-funded by the European Union’s Justice Programme and is implemented by APIS in partnership with 6 European academic institutions. The aim of the initiative is to improve the protection of the fundamental rights of persons accused or suspected of a crime by providing up-to-date legal information and expert advice.

APIS contributes to the project by developing an online platform that provides information on both EU legislation and case law, as well as national legislation and national implementation measures adopted by Member States to transpose EU directives.

In addition, the system provides assistance in resolving cases concerning the rights of individuals in criminal proceedings.

SMEDATA

Ensuring the Highest Degree of Privacy and Personal Data Protection through Innovative Tools for SMEs and Citizens

SMEDATA project is co-funded by the European Union’s Rights, Equality and Citizenship Programme in partnership with the Bulgarian and the Italian Data Protection Authority. The main objective of the project is to support the effective implementation of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) by organising a series of awareness-raising events and training seminars, as well as by developing a self-assessment tool and a mobile application.

APIS's involvement in the project focuses on developing the innovative „GDPR in your pocket“ mobile application, designed to give citizens and businesses easy and instant way for obtaining information about their rights and obligations, as well as practical advices on personal data protection.

InterLex

Advisory and Training system for Internet-related Private International Law

InterLex project is co-funded by the European Union’s Justice Programme and is implemented with the participation of partners from several European countries. The project aims to increase the competence on EU instruments in the field of private international law, and in particular on aspects related to the Internet and the digital economy.

APIS participates in the project by developing an online platform that provides legal information, decision support and training on private international law.

The platform helps the user to determine jurisdiction and applicable law in a specific civil or commercial case involving an international element. A large collection of texts of relevant EU and national legislation, case law, expert materials and training tools are freely available.

ECLI-BG

Implementation of the ECLI Identifier in Bulgaria and Interconnection with the e-Justice Portal

The ECLI-BG project was implemented with the financial support of the European Union’s Justice Programme. The project’s objective was to introduce the European Case Law Identifier (ECLI) in Bulgaria in order to facilitate the correct and unequivocal citation of judgments of EU and national courts and to improve cross-border accessibility of case law.

As a result of the implementation of the project, in which APIS participated as a coordinator in partnership with the Union of Bulgarian Jurists, in April 2018 the ECLI identifier was introduced in the Bulgarian national case law portal (ЦУБИПСА) and connected with the ECLI Search Engine in the European e-Justice Portal.

The project was completed with the active support of the Supreme Judicial Council in its capacity of ECLI Coordinator for Bulgaria.

EUCases

European and National Case Law and Legislation Linked in Open Data Stack

EUCases project was implemented with the financial support of the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme for Research and Technological Development.

The project aimed at development of a pan-European platform and services linking legislation and case law of the Member States to the legal system of the European Union.

As a result of its implementation, the first products and services of APIS targeting not only for Bulgarian, but also European customers were created: EuroCases – a multilingual legal information system providing access to case law of leading European jurisdictions related to the implementation of EU law and Link Detector – a free software add-on tool for browsers and Microsoft Word identifying legal citations to Bulgarian and EU law.