Automated Generation of Procedural Documents during the Pretrial Phase of a Criminal Case

The paper analyzes the use of official forms of procedural documents in pretrial proceedings in criminal cases. Based on an examination of authors’ positions and the legislation of post-Soviet countries concerning the approval of official pretrial forms at any level, the author concludes that such forms should be officially approved by a subordinate interagency regulation. At the same time, given the development of digital technologies, merely approving the forms cannot be considered sufficient. Drawing on foreign experience, the paper argues for the creation of a document constructor for the automated generation of pretrial procedural documents and proposes requirements for the content of that information system: templates of procedural document forms; ready-made examples of crime descriptions connected with the specific paragraph, part, and article of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation (for example, for drafting an indictment); automatic preliminary determination of the legal classification of the act based on data filed by the official conducting the preliminary investigation; connectivity to various government registries and databases; freedom to make decisions and full control, especially over the narrative-and-reasoning section of court decisions; the use of non-generative artificial intelligence methods (without creating new text); and the ability to search a database of previously created and anonymized pretrial procedural documents to find the most suitable examples for drafting the narrative-and-reasoning section of a judgment.

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