Courts struggle to keep pace with Brazil’s data protection demands

In today's digital era, data has become the backbone of modern society and legal systems across the globe are grappling with how to regulate, enforce, and adapt privacy laws to protect individuals from misuse. In Brazil, where the General Data Protection Law (LGPD) was enacted in 2018, researchers have turned to judicial records to understand how courts interpret and apply these evolving principles.

A new study titled “Data Protection in Brazil: Applying Text Mining in Court Documents”, published in Engineering Proceedings, examines over 10,000 court documents to reveal patterns in enforcement, legal interpretation, and regional disparities in data protection jurisprudence.

What does legal text mining reveal about data protection cases in Brazil?

The research analyzed 10,009 legal documents scraped from JusBrasil, a national legal database, to map the distribution of jurisprudence related to data protection across Brazil’s state courts. Using advanced text mining techniques and a curated list of LGPD-related keywords, the study shows that the southeast and southern regions of Brazil dominate data protection rulings. The Court of Justice of São Paulo (TJ-SP) led the nation in the number of rulings, followed by Rio Grande do Sul (TJ-RS), Rio de Janeiro (TJ-RJ), and other states in Brazil’s most developed economic zones.

The dominance of the southeastern region is unsurprising given its status as the country's most populous and economically active corridor. However, the study also finds stark imbalances: TJ-SP alone yielded 1,172 more results than TJ-RS, reflecting a sharp skew in legal attention and perhaps in reporting or enforcement practices.

The most frequent types of court documents related to data protection were judgments and sentences, comprising over 68% of the dataset. This suggests that decisions are often being made at appellate rather than trial levels, indicating that issues of data protection are either escalated frequently or not sufficiently addressed in lower courts. Legal summaries, or súmulas, were notably absent, suggesting a lack of established legal consensus or binding precedent across jurisdictions.

In addition to identifying geographic trends, the researchers also tracked which key legal concepts appeared most frequently in court decisions. Terms like “sensitive personal data,” “data leak,” “data processing,” “DPO (Data Protection Officer),” and “publicization” emerged as prominent themes. These recurring phrases reflect the real-world friction points between Brazil's data protection framework and the digital practices of institutions and individuals. For example, “publicization” had the highest individual term frequency, particularly in decisions from TJ-RS, hinting at legal disputes over the unintended or unauthorized exposure of personal information.

How was the data protection landscape mapped and analyzed?

The study’s methodology combined web scraping, data cleaning, and keyword-based content classification across multiple state courts. To avoid JusBrasil’s access restrictions and anti-scraping protections, researchers implemented a sophisticated search strategy that broke down queries by court and jurisprudence type. This yielded more granular insights and allowed for a more precise mapping of the legal ecosystem surrounding data protection.

The six types of jurisprudence included in the analysis were legal judgments (acórdãos), decisions, sentences, orders or dispatches (despachos), and jurisprudential guidelines, each representing a different procedural stage or interpretive weight. Notably, the more serious and precedent-setting forms such as judgments and sentences dominated the dataset, indicating where most substantive interpretations of LGPD are occurring.

The analysis also exposed variations in how states frame and prioritize different data protection themes. For instance, while São Paulo had high mentions of “sensitive personal data” and “data leak,” Rio de Janeiro courts had more frequent references to “DPO.” Courts in Paraná highlighted “data processing,” and Rio Grande do Sul was prominent for “privacy” and “publicization.” This variation may reflect both the regional differences in digital infrastructure and the localized impacts of data privacy incidents.

Moreover, the study utilized data visualization tools to present heatmaps and trend graphs that showed not just the frequency of key legal terms, but also their evolving usage over time. While only 4,587 of the scraped documents had complete date metadata, a clear trend emerged: the volume of data protection-related legal actions has steadily increased since the promulgation of the LGPD in 2018. However, collection gaps, due to platform limitations, indicate that the number of rulings is likely higher than currently documented.

What are the legal and policy implications of the study’s findings?

The research holds significant implications for public administrators, legal practitioners, and digital policy strategists. First, it provides empirical confirmation that data protection enforcement in Brazil is regionally skewed, with some courts actively engaging with LGPD enforcement while others lag behind. This asymmetry could undermine the uniform application of privacy rights and legal redress across the country.

Second, the overwhelming concentration of decisions in higher courts suggests a deficiency in first-instance judicial readiness. This may reflect a lack of training, institutional inertia, or legal ambiguity around the LGPD’s practical application at trial level. Strengthening judicial capacity at these lower levels could accelerate and democratize access to data protection enforcement.

Third, the study surfaces a clear need for better policy coordination. With less than 30% of Brazilian companies reportedly compliant with LGPD, the judicial system becomes a last-resort mechanism rather than a preventive tool. Legal decisions are essential for shaping practice, but without proactive inspections, clearer regulatory guidance, and institutional support, they cannot fully offset systemic vulnerabilities.

Importantly, the study shows that legal data mining can be an effective technique not just for academic insight, but for regulatory benchmarking and public accountability. Profiling jurisprudence by region, term, and case type offers a foundation for risk mapping, targeted education, and tailored policy intervention.

The dataset’s temporal scope can be further expanded to analyze jurisprudential evolution before and after LGPD, and use named entity recognition to extract industry-specific trends. This could aid in identifying which sectors are most vulnerable to non-compliance and which courts are leading or lagging in enforcement.