Aipa legal system faces criticism after delays and outage

Finland’s shared Aipa information system for courts and prosecutors has caused problems that legal professionals fear could threaten people’s legal protection, Yle reports. The system was introduced in stages while still incomplete, and its costs nearly doubled to 67.7 million euros.

Aipa has frustrated judges and prosecutors, lengthened court proceedings and delayed decisions. In some cases, trials have even been cancelled.

The system suffered an unprecedented three-day outage last August. During the disruption, courts were unable to issue judgments. Marko Loisa, head of the development department at the National Courts Administration, said the cause of the serious disruption had been identified but could not be disclosed in detail for security reasons.

“A certain bottleneck had formed in the system, and when it was isolated, operations returned to normal,” Loisa said.

Loisa described Aipa as an exceptionally broad and complex system, but said an outage of that severity could not be allowed to happen. He added that the National Courts Administration was not aware of any case in which legal protection had genuinely been endangered because of Aipa.

Aipa receives between 60 and 100 error reports each month from users. Some reports concern the same observations made by different users, while only a small proportion lead to repairs to the system.

What is Aipa?

Aipa is the shared case and document management system used by Finland’s general courts and the Prosecution Service. It has more than 3,000 users, including prosecutors, prosecutors’ secretaries, judges, court and legal administration secretaries, and process servers.

The system is used to register cases, bring charges, serve documents, issue judgments and deliver official notifications. The Aipa project office at the National Courts Administration has had overall responsibility for its development. Several suppliers have worked on its development and further development under a multiple-supplier model, while the Legal Register Centre is responsible for maintenance.

According to Loisa, not every problem attributed to Aipa is necessarily caused by the system itself. Information transfer between Aipa and other systems can be interrupted by faults or outages in networks or the data connections used by authorities.

A project launched in 2010

The Ministry of Justice launched the project in 2010 to create a shared information system for the general courts and the Prosecution Service. The aim was to build an electronic system for handling criminal cases, incorporating the Prosecution Service’s electronic system and making it compatible with Vitja, an information system being developed by the Ministry of the Interior for the police.

The planned compatibility with Vitja fell through after police ended that project in 2023, completing only part of it. Aipa also proved to be a larger undertaking than expected, so its scope was reduced and implementation began in stages.

The project’s original budget was 34.4 million euros, but costs rose to 67.7 million euros. Maintenance and further development costs are additional.

The National Audit Office of Finland criticised the implementation of Aipa and two other government information system projects in an audit report published in 2024. It said Aipa had been planned on too large a scale, with overly broad and unrealistic objectives. The timetable was unrealistic and failed because of poor planning, while there was too little information and communications technology expertise.

The audit also found that the needs of different groups had not been sufficiently considered, users had not been involved enough and communication had been inadequate. Functions that were supposed to be completed during the project had instead been postponed to the further development phase.