The law, in Article 33 of the Justice Reform Act, aims to stop anyone, but particularly legal tech companies, from building models of judicial reasoning.

“The identity data of magistrates and members of the judiciary cannot be reused with the purpose or effect of evaluating, analysing, comparing or predicting their actual or alleged professional practices.”

Insiders have told Artificial Lawyer that the law is a direct result of efforts to make law easily accessible to the general public.

But French judges had not realised that natural language processing and machine learning companies would be able to reveal patterns about how certain judges behave, or how they compare to their colleagues.

One legal tech expert in France told Artificial Lawyer: “In the past few years there has been a growing debate in France about whether the names of judges should be removed from the decisions when those decisions are published online.

“The proponents of this view obtained this [new law] as a compromise from the government, i.e. that judges’ names shouldn’t be redacted (with some exceptions to be determined) but that they cannot be used for statistical purposes.”