Legal informatics is an area within information science.
The American Library Association defines informatics as "the study of the structure and properties of information, as well as the application of technology to the organization, storage, retrieval, and dissemination of information." Legal informatics therefore, pertains to the application of informatics within the context of the legal environment and as such involves law-related organizations (e.g., law offices, courts, and law schools) and users of information and information technologies within these organizations.[1]
Policy issues
Policy issues in legal informatics arise from the use of informational technologies in the implementation of law, such as the use of subpoenas for information found in emails, search queries, and social networks. Policy approaches to legal informatics issues vary throughout the world. For example, European countries tend to require the destruction or anonymization of data so that it cannot be used for discovery.[2]
Technology
Cloud computing
The widespread introduction of cloud computing provides several benefits in delivering legal services. Legal service providers can use the Software as a Service model to earn a profit by charging customers a per-use or subscription fee. This model has several benefits over traditional bespoke services.
Software as a service also complicates the attorney-client relationship in a way that may have implications for attorney–client privilege. The traditional delivery model makes it easy to create delineations of when attorney-client privilege attaches and when it does not. But in more complex models of legal service delivery other actors or automated processes may moderate the relationship between a client and their attorney making it difficult to tell which communications should be legally privileged.[3]
- Software as a service is much more scalable. Traditional bespoke models require an attorney to spend more of a limited resource (their time) on each additional client. Using Software as a Service, a legal service provider can put in effort once to develop the product and then use a much less limited resource (cloud computing power) to provide service to each additional customer.
Legal practice
Within the practice issues conceptual area, progress continues to be made on both litigation and transaction focused technologies. In particular, technology including predictive coding has the potential to effect substantial efficiency gains in law practice. Though predictive coding has largely been applied in the litigation space, it is beginning to make inroads in transaction practice, where it is being used to improve document review in mergers and acquisitions.[59] Other advances, including XML coding in transaction contracts, and increasingly advanced document preparation systems demonstrate the importance of legal informatics in the transactional law space.[60][61]
Current applications of AI in the legal field utilize machines to review documents, particularly when a high level of completeness and confidence in the quality of document analysis is depended upon, such as in instances of litigation and where due diligence play a role.[62] Predictive coding leverages small samples to cross-reference similar items, weed out less relevant documents so attorneys can focus on the truly important key documents, produces statistically validated results, equal to or surpassing the accuracy and, prominently, the rate of human review.[62]
See also
- Computational law
- Jurimetrics
- Legal Electronic Data Exchange Standard
- Legal expert system
- Legal Information Retrieval
- Lawbot
References
- Sanda Erdelez, Sheila O'Hare. Legal Informatics: Application of Information Technology in Law Annual Review of Information Science and Technology, 1997^
- Ron A Dolin. Search Query Privacy: The Problem of Anonymization Hastings Science & Technology Law Journal^
- Chris Johnson, Leveraging Technology to Deliver Legal Services, 23 HARV. J.L. & TECH.259, 279 (2009).^