In order to equip state agents, an agreement was signed between the government and Doctrine, a French artificial intelligence company in the legal sector – a sort of gigantic digital library capable of reading and classifying documents very quickly. But this partnership is making a sector cringe, pointing to a recent conviction for unfair competition of this company owned by an American fund.
This partnership is a continuation of the agreement concluded on November 18 between the French and German governments, alongside the companies Mistral and SAP, for the deployment of AI in the public sector. But this time, the letter of commitment signed Tuesday by the Minister Delegate for the Civil Service, David Amiel, and the president of Doctrine, Guillaume Carrère, did not go unnoticed in the world of legal publishing.
According to this agreement, the company which collaborates with the Ministry of the Interior and claims several hundred partner public entities will provide State jurists with artificial intelligence tools to “simplify” certain missions, according to a press release from the Ministry of Public Service and Doctrine.
“In an era where there is so much frustration generated by internal processes, by paperwork, it would make no sense not to give public officials, in their workplace, the instruments that they have in their personal lives or that the private sector has,” explains the minister to Les Échos, praising a “new doctrine” concerning public-private partnerships.
Lack of details
Agents will benefit from training dedicated to these technological “solutions”. However, the total cost of the operation is not defined, the number of agents equipped is not known, and the tools made available have not been detailed.
In addition, the ministry’s assurance that the agreement is “not exclusive” and the invitation to companies in the sector to make offers are far from reassuring. “I fell out of my chair,” says Denis Berthault, director of content development at Lexisnexis, while Fabien Girard, chairman of the board of Lexibase, sees it “the logical result of this company’s permanent lobbying of public authorities.”
Above all, they point to the recent conviction of the company which owns Doctrine.fr for “unfair competition”.
Public data
In May, five major legal publishers, including Dalloz, Lexisnexis, and Lexibase, won on appeal, and the courts found “serious, precise and consistent presumptions” according to which Forseti, the operating company of Doctrine.fr, had “obtained hundreds of thousands of court decisions from administrative courts”, and “hundreds of thousands of decisions from first instance courts in an illicit manner”.
This website was accused by its competitors of having plundered their databases, which these publishers had created by contacting court registries.
According to the specialized site LégalConseil.fr, Doctrine was accused in its early days of abusing “aggressive web scrapping”, that is to say the use of software robots to automatically extract content from other websites, “sometimes in disregard of the conditions of use or the server load imposed on institutional sites”. The situation would have normalized today.
With this partnership, “we exonerate in the media an actor who continues to disseminate stolen data, and we recommend it to state officials,” believes Denis Berthault, regretting that the courts did not ask the company to delete this data.
The government defends itself
“Commercial litigation is part of the life of successful companies,” “and we understand that Doctrine’s growth may cause discomfort,” the company responded. “The legal procedure has been closed”, responds the Ministry of Civil Service, ensuring that “strict compliance with the rules of public procurement will apply to any future implementation”.
But for Fabien Girard, the partnership does not bode well for future calls for tenders. “You imagine the power of the applicant (Doctrine) given that he has a letter of intent? », he asks.
The company could benefit from “privileged information” thanks to this partnership, but “any contract worth more than 100,000 euros must go through a call for tenders” to comply with the law, assures an internal source at Lefebvre-Dalloz, on condition of anonymity.
American flag
She considers it “shocking that we trust a company whose majority of shareholders are held by an American fund when we advocate sovereignty”, and evokes “risks of sales to other foreign funds”.
Created in 2016, Doctrine.fr has experienced strong growth and raised 10 million euros in June 2018 from the Otium Venture fund and Xavier Niel, the boss of Iliad, parent company of Free. In 2023, Forseti, the operating company of Doctrine.fr, announced that it had come under the control of the American investment fund Summit Partners, based in Boston, which claims $45 billion in assets under management worldwide.
It declares that it is present in the capital of “550 companies”, particularly in the fields of technology and health, and counts among the best known the American Uber and the French Veepee (formerly Private Sales.com).
But “our shareholder base is European: Summit Partners via its European fund, Peugeot Invest and Doctrine employees who wanted to invest at the time of the buyout,” argues Doctrine, which says it is “proud to produce legal AI made in France”.