Legal Data Analytics: Developing Assistive Tools for Legal Practitioners

With the advancement of the Web and large number of legal documents being made available digitally, legal practitioners are now facing new challenges. It is now intractable for them to manually find relevant information (prior cases, related statutes, etc.) that would assist an ongoing case. From our discussions with law experts from India (faculty members from the Rajiv Gandhi School of Intellectual Property Law, India) as well as other countries like UK (Swansea University) and USA (Thomson Reuters), we understand that it is important to develop assistive tools for several tasks in the legal domain, e.g., identifying relevant documents, summarizing legal text, and so on. Though there exist legal information systems (e.g., Thomson Reuters WestLaw, LexisNexis), often law practitioners are not satisfied with the search results/summaries available on such systems. Developing assistive tools in the legal domain needs addressing certain research challenges. We outline the challenges and some initial progress made on each of them.