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, find, and share it. Legal informatics applies this study to the legal field, focusing on law-related organizations—such as law firms, courts, and law schools—and the people who use information and technology within them.

Policy issues in legal informatics stem from using information technology to carry out the law, for instance when subpoenas target emails, search histories, or social media activity. Different countries handle these issues differently. In Europe, for example, laws often require data to be destroyed or anonymized so it cannot be used in discovery.

Cloud computing has brought several advantages to legal services. Providers can use a Software as a Service model, charging customers per use or through a subscription. This approach is more scalable than traditional bespoke services, where an attorney must spend more of their limited time on each new client. With SaaS, the provider invests effort once to build the product and then uses cloud computing power—a far 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 is more convenient too, since it does not require the provider and customer to be available at the same time. However, SaaS complicates the attorney-client relationship, especially regarding privilege. In the traditional model, it is easy to define when privilege applies. In more complex delivery models, other actors or automated processes may mediate the relationship, making it unclear which communications are legally privileged.

Artificial intelligence is used in online dispute resolution platforms that rely on optimization algorithms and blind-bidding. AI also frequently models legal ontology—a formal, explicit specification of concepts, properties, and relationships within a given domain. The subfield of artificial intelligence 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 issues to AI more broadly. For example, theories of legal decision-making, particularly argumentation models, have advanced knowledge representation and reasoning. Models of social organization based on norms have influenced multi-agent systems. Reasoning with legal cases has contributed to case-based reasoning, and the need to store and retrieve large amounts of text has led to advances in conceptual information retrieval and intelligent databases.

Although early thinkers like Loevinger, Allen, and Mehl anticipated key ideas, the first serious proposal for applying AI to law is generally credited to Buchanan and Headrick. Early projects include Thorne McCarty’s TAXMAN in the US and Ronald Stamper’s LEGOL in the UK. Notable work in the early 1980s includes Carole Hafner’s research 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, conferences organized by IDG in Florence, and workshops led 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 future 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 for 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 Akoma Ntoso standard for interoperable legal documents enables machine-driven processes to work with the syntactic and semantic components of digital parliamentary, judicial, and legislative documents, supporting the creation of high-quality information resources and providing a foundation for AI tools. Its goal is to improve the performance, accountability, quality, and openness of parliamentary and legal processes.