The right to individual privacy is exceptionally important in France. This applies in many spheres, from presidential love affairs to child-rearing. But the topic has recently surfaced in the area of legal technology.

Earlier this year, the French government made it illegal for legal technology businesses (or anyone else) to publish analysis of data relating to judges' decisions. The ban, thought to be the first of its kind anywhere in the world, comes with a potential penalty of five years in prison.

The piece of legislation (Article 33 of France's Justice Reform Act) came about after lobbying from judges, who had failed to anticipate how easily legal technology businesses can use publicly available French court data to probe how judges rule on certain issues, or how their decisions might differ from those made by other judges.

The move seemed extreme to many outside France. The data in question is publicly available information, after all. Somewhat ironically, the provision was included in an act designed to make courts' decisions more easily available to the general public.

There was also opposition to Article 33 from within France. Unsurprisingly, much came from legal technology businesses.

"These kinds of laws are a disgrace for a democracy," Louis Larret Chahine, the managing director of Predictice, a French legal technology company with a focus on litigation analysis, told Artificial Lawyer magazine in June. "Justice is dispensed on behalf of the people. Trying to hide information from law professionals or citizens will never be the right thing to do."

Meanwhile, Nicolas Bustamante, chief executive officer of the French legal information platform Doctrine, told Legal Week in July that the law was "unconstitutional" and would be repealed.

But a few months on from the passing of Article 33, many French lawyers do not see the way it clips the wings of some legal technology businesses as problematic.

Sonia Cissé, a Linklaters counsel who heads the firm's TMT team in Paris, thinks the ban should be seen in the context of wider steps taken to protect individual privacy in the face of technological  developments by the EU as a whole, such as 2016's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

The kinds of legal technology tools specifically targeted by the ban were "going a bit too far", she says. "It's fine to try to draw a pattern in decisions from courts, but when you focus on individuals, on the judges themselves, that is quite a different way of analysing things."

Arnaud Touati, a lawyer at French startups specialist Hashtag Cabinet d'Avocats, counts himself as more in tune with, and more positively disposed to, developments in legal technology than many French lawyers. Yet he too sees Article 33 as a "good decision" on the grounds that personalised analysis of judges' decisions is inappropriate.

Others make the practical point that analysis of judges' decisions is simply less significant in France than some other jurisdictions, such as the U.S., because of a relative paucity of case law.

Suspicious about tech

And it is not only litigation prediction tools that are facing opposition. There is also a degree of suspicion among French lawyers about legal technology products in general. As well as case law analysers, these could also include ones that review large numbers of documents disclosed in relation to M&A deals or litigation, generate first drafts of routine documents, or capture and summarise billing data for clients.

"Not a lot," is Touati's response when asked for his estimation of the extent to which most French law firms use these kinds of products and services. "I'm not too sure that half of them have a website," he adds.

"Lawyers often do not spend time looking for solutions that would allow them to optimise their business," says Pascal Martinez, founder of JuriPredis, a company that provides a case law search engine and decision support tool for lawyers. "Some professions equip themselves naturally with technological solutions; this is not yet a reflex for legal practitioners."

Some evidence of this can be found in attitudes of professional associations for lawyers in France. Paris's bar association has expressed objections to some legal technology companies on the basis that they purport to provide legal advice without being licensed to do so, reports Frédéric Bouvet, managing partner of Herbert Smith Freehill's Paris office. And a few years ago, the French national bar association brought a case against Doctrine, which provides a legal texts search engine, on data protection grounds. The case has now been settled.

Related to privacy concerns, data security is another huge issue many French lawyers have with legal technology. Using services such as AI-powered document review for M&A deals can involve uploading relevant documents to cloud-based servers, which comes with the potential threat of exposure to hackers.

Alongside these kinds of big-picture problems, French lawyers also have a host of practical grumbles about incorporating legal technology products into their practices. For instance, the fact that some document review tools cannot read PDFs limits their usefulness on M&A deals, says Bouvet.

Meanwhile, his colleague Eric Fiszelson, HSF's head of finance for the EMEA region, complains that the "beta" culture of trial and error common in the technology world is at odds with lawyers' expectations of a perfect product from day one.

Junior lawyers, the ones who mostly uses these products, need to be engaged through significant training to make the tools effective, he continues. Meanwhile, scepticism among the senior lawyers whose sign-off is required to buy and install legal technology tools is another hurdle.

Lawyers' France-specific concerns include that some tools are not adapted for French language usage (or German or Spanish, for that matter) – though some France-specific products are available.

In addition, the fact that some important groups of French clients, including banks and private equity firms, are not particularly interested in legal technology is also slowing uptake, as client demands can often drive decisions in this area. One managing partner of the Paris office of a global law firm says there is a marked difference in awareness of legal technology between French and American financial institutions in particular.

Some inroads

But it would be wrong to say that legal technology is not making any inroads in France – the extent of lawyers' complaints about it reflect the fact that it is present in working processes at many firms, if mainly larger and more international ones.

In some cases, France is leading the way. HSF's Paris office has piloted legal technology tools for the global network. French lawyers at HSF and other firms are partnering with French legal technology startups, which should help to overcome issues such as the lack of French-language products.

And there are French lawyers who think that government restrictions on the development and use of legal technology such as Article 33 are misguided. "The issue requires more work… the current situation is not ideal," says one senior French corporate lawyer.

He sees the ban as isolating France, rather than aligning it with a general EU movement to protect privacy rights from potential infringements by technology companies. He points out that the ban does not prevent companies based outside France providing the kind of analysis it prohibits.

Following this logic, there is a risk that legislation like Article 33 could put the homegrown French legal technology sector on the back foot, and potentially deprive French law firms of some of the benefits that legal technology developed in their own market could bring.

Law firms operating in France that are not part of large global networks in particular are already likely to be at a disadvantage when it comes to legal technology, because of the relative lack of resources they have available to buy and develop legal technology tools.

Combine this with a tendency in France towards ambivalence about legal technology and, for some, the French taste for privacy could turn into exclusion.