LexNET is on its way out: what Citius is, and what is still undecided

In July, while half the profession was getting ready for the holidays, the Ministry of Justice published a prior public consultation on a draft royal decree “on electronic communications in the Administration of Justice” and “regulating the Citius system”. The window for comments was fifteen calendar days and closed on 23 July 2026. The headlines were quick: “LexNET is disappearing”.

That is true in one sense and misleading in another. A decision has been made — LexNET will stop being the reference system, and the Ministry would rather write a new regulation than patch the current one — but there is still no draft text, no timetable and not a single new obligation for practitioners. This piece separates what is known from what is not, and ends with what we think a firm should do in the meantime. Which, to say it up front, is not much and not exciting.

The LexNET basics — how notifications arrive and when the deadline starts running — are in our article on LexNET for lawyers and in the notifications guide. We won’t repeat them here.

What a prior public consultation is (and isn’t)

Art. 26.2 of Spain’s Government Act (Ley 50/1997) requires that, before drafting a regulation, the competent ministry open a public consultation on four things: the problems the rule is meant to solve, whether it is needed, its objectives and the alternatives. The minimum period is fifteen calendar days — exactly what was given.

In other words, what was published in July is not a draft. It is a short document explaining why a new rule is wanted and what it should achieve. The text comes later and, if it affects people’s rights and legitimate interests — this one affects everyone who litigates — it must be published for a public hearing (art. 26.6 of the same Act). That is when there will be articles to read. Not now.

What the document does say

Read in full, the Ministry’s document makes five things clear.

1. Royal Decree 1065/2015 will be replaced. That is the regulation currently governing LexNET in the territory where the Ministry has direct competence. The document considers amending it, but prefers a new royal decree that systematically incorporates the framework of Royal Decree-law 6/2023.

2. Citius is presented as an evolution of LexNET, not as a different system built from scratch. The stated aim is a platform that is “more advanced, flexible and interoperable”, better integrated with court case-management systems and with other administrations’ platforms — it names the Registry Interconnection System (SIR) and INSIDE, plus regional and local platforms.

3. The scope is the same as today, widened by RDL 6/2023. Electronic filing of submissions and documents, service of copies, notifications and any other electronic step.

4. The guarantees are listed: access, authenticity, confidentiality, integrity, availability, traceability, portability and interoperability.

5. “Data-oriented” forms appear, approved by the State Technical Committee for Electronic Judicial Administration. This is not new to the regulation: art. 53 of RDL 6/2023 already provides that communication channels will be metadata-tagged and data-oriented, using common, interoperable schemas and data models.

That fifth point is, in our view, the only one that could genuinely change day-to-day work. Today a court filing is essentially a signed PDF with a few header fields. A data-oriented system expects the matter’s information — parties, proceedings, court, type of filing — to travel in structured form. How demanding that will be, and for which filings, is precisely what nobody knows yet.

What is not known

This list is longer than the previous one, and it is worth keeping to hand whenever someone talks about Citius with confidence.

• Dates. There is no implementation timetable: not for approval of the royal decree, not for go-live, not for switching LexNET off.
• Transitional arrangements. Nobody knows whether the two systems will run in parallel, for how long, or what happens to pending proceedings.
• Practitioners’ obligations. The document defers to what the regulation will establish, including the role of the applications run by the general councils of lawyers, court agents (procuradores) and labour-law practitioners (graduados sociales). Which certificates, which formats, which interface: none of it is fixed.
• Regions. Integration is framed around the case-management systems of the territories that choose to use it. What regions with their own systems will do is not stated, and firms that litigate across several of them do not yet know how many channels they will be juggling.
• Forms. Which will be mandatory, which voluntary, and from when.

The risk is in the transition, not the technology

Bar associations have long warned that the problems with digital justice are rarely about design and usually about rollout. At a session held at the Madrid Bar (ICAM) in May 2025, speakers described electronic court files as “incomplete, disorganised and unnumbered”. In February 2026, a member of the ICAM governing board complained that, as the new first-instance courts (Tribunales de Instancia) came into operation, filings addressed using the courts’ old names were being rejected automatically in districts such as Alcobendas.

Neither has anything to do with Citius. Both illustrate the same point: when the infrastructure changes, the risk to the firm is not the new functionality but the period in which old and new coexist badly. Any move from LexNET to Citius will have such a period. The sensible thing is to prepare for that, not for the finished product.

What to do in the meantime

Our recommendation is deliberately unspectacular.

1. Don’t change anything that works. RD 1065/2015 is still in force and LexNET is still the channel. Checking the inbox daily, assigning every notification to a named person and computing deadlines in writing are exactly as necessary on 7 September as they were on 7 July.

2. Be wary of anyone selling “Citius compatibility”. There is no public technical specification to be compatible with. That promise cannot be verified today, and in this area what cannot be verified should not drive a purchasing decision.

3. Clean up each matter’s data. If the direction is data-oriented forms, what will pay off is having in every file — correctly written and in one place — the proceedings number, the NIG (the general identification number courts assign to each case), the court under its current name after the Tribunales de Instancia reform, and the parties with their identifiers. That work is useful today, Citius or no Citius.

4. Keep evidence of outages. Art. 12 of RD 1065/2015 provides that, after an unplanned service interruption, a filing can be lodged on the next business day together with proof of the interruption. If the transition brings downtime, firms already in the habit of requesting and keeping that proof will have fewer problems.

5. Follow the process through your bar association. The useful moment to weigh in will be the public hearing on the draft text. Bar associations and general councils usually channel comments; if your practice could be affected — high volume, several regions, bulk filings — that is the route.

Where Mandato stands

Today Mandato receives and organises LexNET notifications inside each case file, as described on the LexNET integration page. On Citius we have no more information than what has been published, and we are not going to announce support for a system whose regulation does not yet exist. We will follow the rules as they are defined, and say so when there is something concrete to say.