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The French Government has banned the publication of all data analysis related to judges' rulings in France and will impose a prison sentence of up to five years on those violating the law.

The move, believed to be the first such ban anywhere in the world, is likely to have a huge impact on legaltech and data analytics companies, and also could affect in-house legal departments and law firms.

The new law, Article 33 of the Justice Reform Act, is aimed at preventing anyone – but especially legaltech companies focused on litigation prediction and analytics – from publicly revealing the pattern of judges' behaviour in relation to court decisions.

"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," the legislation states.

However, judicial decisions in France and the names of the judges who make those decisions will continue to be made publicly available.

News of the legislation was first reported by Artificial Lawyer.

The new law was written as a direct result of an earlier effort to make all case law in France easily accessible to the general public, which included the publication of judges' decisions – part of a move toward greater transparency in the French judicial system.

At the time, France's judges did not anticipate the existence of a burgeoning legaltech sector, comprised of companies that can easily use public data to analyse how judges respond to certain types of legal matters or arguments, or how they compare to other judges.

Judicial decisions will still be publicly available and judges' names will not be redacted. But the new law means that companies will be barred from analysing a total body of rulings associated with a judge's name. They will not be able to aggregate data on verdicts and create a record about a specific judge.

The law also could affect corporate legal departments and law firms that rely on third-party data analytics for case assessment and appellate work.