Legal informatics

Legal informatics is a branch of information science. According to the American Library Association, informatics is the study of how information is structured and what properties it has, along with how technology is used to organize, store, retrieve, and share that information. Legal informatics applies these ideas to the legal field, covering law-related organizations—such as law offices, courts, and law schools—and the people and technologies that handle information within them.

Policy issues

Policy issues in legal informatics stem from using information technology to carry out the law. For instance, subpoenas can target information in emails, search queries, and social networks. Different regions handle these issues differently; European countries, for example, often require data to be destroyed or anonymized so it cannot be used for discovery.

Cloud computing

Cloud computing has introduced several benefits for delivering legal services. Legal service providers can use a Software as a Service (SaaS) model, charging customers a per-use or subscription fee. This approach has advantages over traditional bespoke services. SaaS is more scalable: a bespoke model requires an attorney to spend more of their limited time on each new client, whereas with SaaS, the provider invests effort once to develop the product and then uses cloud computing—a much less limited resource—to serve each additional customer.

SaaS can also complement bespoke work by handling routine tasks, freeing attorneys for more complex matters. It can be delivered more conveniently, since the provider does not need to be available at the same time as the customer. However, SaaS complicates the attorney-client relationship, which may affect attorney–client privilege. The traditional model makes it easy to define when privilege attaches, but more complex delivery models introduce other actors or automated processes that mediate the relationship, making it unclear which communications should be privileged.

Artificial intelligence appears in online dispute resolution platforms that use optimization algorithms and blind-bidding. AI is also used to model legal ontology—an explicit, formal, general specification of a conceptualization of the properties of and relations between objects in a given domain.

Artificial intelligence

The subfield of artificial intelligence and law (AI and law) focuses on applying AI to legal informatics problems and conducting original research on those problems. It also contributes in the opposite direction, exporting tools and techniques developed for legal problems to AI in general. For example, theories of legal decision making, especially models of argumentation, have informed knowledge representation and reasoning; models of social organization based on norms have contributed to multi-agent systems; reasoning with legal cases has advanced case-based reasoning; and the need to store and retrieve large amounts of text has led to contributions in conceptual information retrieval and intelligent databases.

Though Loevinger, Allen, and Mehl anticipated several ideas important to AI and law, the first serious proposal for applying AI techniques to law is generally attributed to Buchanan and Headrick. Early work includes Thorne McCarty’s TAXMAN project in the US and Ronald Stamper’s LEGOL project in the UK. Landmarks from the early 1980s include Carole Hafner’s work on conceptual retrieval, Anne Gardner’s work on contract law, Edwina Rissland’s work on legal hypotheticals, and research at Imperial College London on representing legislation through executable logic programs. Early scholarly meetings included a one-off gathering at Swansea, a series of conferences organized by IDG in Florence, and workshops run by Charles Walter at the University of Houston in 1984 and 1985.

In 1987, the biennial International Conference on AI and Law (ICAIL) was established, becoming the main venue for publishing and developing ideas in AI and law. This led to the founding of the International Association for Artificial Intelligence and Law (IAAIL) to organize subsequent ICAILs, and later to the Artificial Intelligence and Law Journal, first published in 1992. In Europe, the annual JURIX conferences, organized by the Jurix Foundation for Legal Knowledge Based Systems, began in 1988.

Initially aimed at Dutch and Flemish researchers, JURIX quickly became an international, primarily European conference, and since 2002 has regularly been held outside Dutch-speaking countries. Since 2007, the JURISIN workshops have been held in Japan under the Japanese Society for Artificial Intelligence. The interoperable legal documents standard Akoma Ntoso allows machine-driven processes to operate on the syntactic and semantic components of digital parliamentary, judicial, and legislative documents, supporting the development of high-quality information resources and forming a basis for AI tools. Its goal is to improve the performance, accountability, quality, and openness of parliamentary and legislative processes.