Legal and Administrative Services Through Electronic Commerce

This paper presents the issues related to the implementation of electronic commerce of services. To illustrate the main features of electronic commerce of services, we have selected legal and administrative services. We describe in the paper the actors who take part in these services, the system architecture and the workflow that defines the interactions and interchange of information among actors. With these elements we have implemented an electronic commerce application inside the TRADE project 2 that demonstrates how these services can be offered in an electronic manner. 1 Electronic commerce of legal and administrative services This section attempts to describe in a general way the characteristics of electronic commerce of services. In particular, we have selected legal and administrative services to show the advantages of providing services through electronic means. 1.1 Electronic commerce of services vs. electronic commerce of products When we talk about electronic commerce, we are usually thinking about electronic commerce of products, but there is also another kind of electronic commerce, the electronic commerce of services. Whilst electronic commerce of products consists on selecting the items we want to buy from a catalog and pay for them, electronic commerce of services consists on searching for a professional or company that offers the service and contract him. During service development, there can be information request, payment or contacts with another users. 1.2 Characteristics of legal and administrative services We have studied in detail the legal and administrative services in order to describe them. These are their main features: • There is a purchase of services. The result of these services (normally documents) is delivered after off-line development. • Many official documents must be interchanged. 1 Working in her Ph.D. at the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC). 2 This work has been partly supported by the European Commission (TRADE, ACTS project 328) and the Spanish government (TEL98-0699-C02-01). • There are business-to-consumer and business-to-business aspects. • Payments can be requested in different moments (in advance, after service, periodically, etc) and several mechanisms can be used (credit card, cheque, bank transfer, etc). • Confidentiality and non-repudiation is needed. • Many actors are involved in the services. These actors have a lot of interaction among them. 1.3 Advantages of providing these services through electronic commerce means In legal and administrative services today, many documents are interchanged among the users involved. These documents are usually delivered by fax, courier, post or in person. If there is an error, the document must be resent, involving a waste of time and money. If legal and administrative services were offered in an electronic way, the professional could send documents from his own PC, after writing them. The document could be resent as many times as needed with just a mouse-click. Here we have the first advantage of providing these services in an electronic way. Most of the steps of legal and administrative services have deadlines that lawyers or administrative consultants must control. If we have an electronic commerce application that controls service development, it could also control deadlines for each case of a lawyer or administrative consultant and notify the involved users that some actions must take effect. Official documents normally have to be signed by several actors involved in the case. At the present moment, some laws and measures are being developed [8] in order to accept digital signatures as the handwritten ones. If this happens, electronic documents could be digitally signed and have the same value as the paper documents in front of administration. Nowadays, we can send documents in an electronic way using e-mail or ftp. There are also centralized applications that control the workflow of legal and administrative services automatically. Our proposal is to define a distributed system that integrates all of these functionalities using electronic commerce, permitting that all users involved in a case had access to its information and status at any time, in a customized manner. 2 An architecture for electronic commerce of legal and administrative services Based on the actors involved in legal and administrative services, we have defined the business and architectural models to facilitate the implementation of the services to be provided in an electronic commerce environment. 2.1 Business model In this section, we describe the actors involved in the legal and administrative services and their relationship. Actors in legal services In figure 1 we can see the actors who can take part in a legal service. The arrows represent the interactions among them. Fig. 1. Actors in legal scenario The main actor in legal services is the lawyer. We will see in following sections that all the flow of information of a legal case passes through him. Actors in the administrative services In figure 2 we can see the actors who can take part in an administrative service. The arrows represent the interactions among them. Fig. 2. Actors in administrative scenario In these services, the administrative consultant is the main actor. He collects the information and is in charge of sending it to the corresponding actor. Client Administration Court Bank Notary Procurator 3 Party Lawyer