The Digital Transformation of the Court System: What Has Changed and What It Means for Business
Auelbek Zinullin, Manager in the Legal Practice at Fortune Partners
Over the past decade, court proceedings in Kazakhstan have moved from isolated electronic filings to fully digital case files, analytical systems and robot-generated procedural decisions. For a lawyer this is not abstract statistics: it changes how a position is prepared, how deadlines are counted, and what the court actually sees when hearing a dispute.
Here is where the system stands and what practical conclusions follow.
Where we are now
In the UN E-Government Development Index, Kazakhstan ranks 24th out of 193 countries — up from 28th in 2022. Since 2020, the UN survey has tracked e-services in the justice sector separately, and the court system's contribution to the country's overall result is substantial.
The path to digital justice ran through three stages. First, final judgments began to be issued electronically. Then the format extended to interim court acts. Today the entire case file, across all types of proceedings, is generated electronically — marking the transition from "electronic" to genuinely "digital" justice.
The Judicial Cabinet: 95% of claims filed online
The Judicial Cabinet supports more than 100 types of filings, allowing documents to be submitted without a visit to the court registry.
The trend speaks for itself: in 2015 roughly 5% of claims were filed electronically; today the figure is 95%. Remaining paper submissions are scanned and processed through the same electronic algorithms, meaning they enter the digital circuit regardless of how they were filed.
Every courtroom in the country is equipped with audio and video recording systems. It is this infrastructure that makes online hearings possible: the formal restriction on in-person hearings was lifted long ago, yet the online format remains in demand.
Accumulated data as the foundation
Over fifteen years the court system has built up the body of data that made the next stage possible:
- 100 million processed electronic documents;
- more than 15 million final judgments in machine-readable format;
- 50 million items of metadata generated;
- more than 2,000 categories of cases monitored by the Situation Centre.
The key phrase here is "machine-readable". A judgment available to the system for analysis is a different thing entirely from a judgment sitting in an archive as a scan.
Digital Judicial Analytics
Since December 2023, a system has been in full operation that does four things:
Keyword search across the texts of all judicial acts.
Understanding the substance of judgments — the system is trained to compare decisions with one another and identify anomalies.
Predicting the outcome of a case on the basis of comparable judgments.
Intelligent search that works not by matching words but by the substance of the situation.
The results are already measurable. In the capital's court, an intelligent module for reconciliation judges helped raise the share of disputes ending in settlement to 56%.
Judges have also gained a set of new tools: assessment of how closely a judgment matches the text of the claim, access to the act and the full electronic case file, filtering by year, category of dispute and territory, and automatic generation of the statement of facts and the parties' arguments.
Robotisation of procedural decisions
Some decisions are now drafted without human involvement at the drafting stage.
Travel bans on debtors. Where the debt exceeds 40 monthly calculation indices and the debtor has been duly notified, a draft is produced by a robot within one minute of the material arriving.
Alimony recovery follows a similar algorithm.
"Undisputed" traffic cases. Since August 2024, administrative offence cases in which the evidence is not contested have been robotised.
Automatic protocols. An electronic protocol from the Unified Register of Administrative Offences is automatically converted into a draft court ruling.
More than a third of all cases and materials are now handled by the courts with some element of robotisation.
The position on AI
The Chairman of the Supreme Court has drawn the line plainly: the technologies being introduced will not replace a human judge. They are an additional tool for ensuring consistency of practice and protecting the rights of those involved in proceedings. Constitutional requirements are not affected, and responsibility for a signed judgment remains with the judge.
At the same time, the introduction of new IT solutions raises legitimate questions — a recognised part of the debate about how the system should develop.
What comes next
Several projects are in development.
A next-generation recording system with Face ID identification of participants and real-time speech-to-text conversion, accessed through the Judicial Cabinet rather than third-party messengers.
A prototype AI service for generating draft judgments, now nearing completion.
Two specialised internet courts covering online fraud, electronic transactions and disputes with internet platforms, with proceedings conducted entirely in digital format. They are envisaged as part of the institutional foundation of Alatau City and are linked to the Alem.AI project.
What this means for business in practice
The figures are striking, but what matters more is how they change the handling of an individual dispute.
Departures from settled practice are now visible. The system compares judgments with one another and flags anomalies. A position built on an unconventional reading of a provision therefore requires stronger justification: the court can now see how comparable cases were decided and how far your approach diverges from the pattern.
Analysing practice is no longer optional. Outcome prediction based on comparable judgments is available to the court. A party that enters proceedings without such analysis is working blind where the other side has the full picture.
Deadlines in robotised categories have contracted. A draft travel ban is produced within a minute of the material arriving. The assumption that "it will take them a while to get to it" no longer holds in these cases.
The Judicial Cabinet is the main channel. With 95% of filings electronic, procedural documents and notifications arrive there. Checking the cabinet regularly is as much a working obligation as checking corporate email, and a missed deadline because nobody noticed will be difficult to explain.
Hearings are recorded in full. Every courtroom is equipped with audio and video recording, and in future with real-time speech recognition. Anything said during proceedings becomes part of the case file.
The Fortune Partners team represents companies in court and administrative disputes, including analysis of court practice in a specific category of cases and the preparation of a procedural position. If you need to assess the prospects of a dispute in light of emerging practice, get in touch.
Based on remarks by Aslambek Mergaliyev, Chairman of the Supreme Court of Kazakhstan, Kazakhstanskaya Pravda, 10 September 2025.
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