Legal technology, also known as Legal Tech, refers to the use of technology and software to provide legal services and support the legal industry. Legal Tech companies are often startups founded with the purpose of disrupting the traditionally conservative legal market.
Different approaches and technologies have been used for legal tasks. Traditional software architecture and web technologies have been used for tasks like providing access to case law. Machine learning approaches have been used to help find documents for due diligence or discovery. Work on making contracts more easy to use involve aspects of user experience design.
Definitions
Legal technology traditionally referred to the application of technology and software to help individual lawyers, law firms, medium and large scale businesses with practice management, document automation, document storage, billing, accounting and electronic discovery. Since 2011, Legal Tech has evolved to be associated more with technology startups disrupting the practice of law by giving people access to online software that reduces or in some cases eliminates the need to consult a lawyer, or by connecting people with lawyers more efficiently through online marketplaces and lawyer-matching websites. In the 2010s tech companies specializing in helping consumers bring claims against traders made legal technology a mass phenomenon. Spearheads of consumer legal tech are Flightright and Fairplane, both specialize in enforcing air passenger rights under the EU's Flight Compensation Regulation. These service providers use claims management automation to process vast quantities of claims cheaply and on a no win no fee basis.
History
From the 1970s through to the 1990s there were several academic attempts to formalize legal reasoning, a knowledge representation task. The International Conference of Artificial Intelligence and Law (ICAIL) has been held since 1987 The first commercially available legal AI system was an expert system released in 1988 by the University of Oxford to tell users if a new piece of legislation, the latent damage act applied to them. Since 2000, there have been more attempts to make legal tasks easier using machine learning approaches rather than knowledge representation. In the mid 2000s so-called predictive coding became possible for use in the discovery process of litigation. These predictive coding tools helped lawyers predict which documents were relevant or irrelevant for the litigation, after having been trained on a subset of documents.
In 1975 in the US, the Federal Judicial Center started the COURTRAN project for the electronic recording of court records. This was initially used for criminal cases, but later was adapted for managing civil cases. COURTRAN was replaced by the Integrated Case Management System in the mid 1980s. The Legal Information Institute was set up in 1992, at Cornell University with the aim of making law more accessible, and began providing access to US supreme court decisions. Development of the PACER to nationwide access to court records, began in 1990 and by the mid 1990s, 180 federal courts were offering fee based access to court records via dial-up internet access. The E-Government Act of 2002 limited the fees to only the extent necessary. The Open Courts Act of 2020 set out a plan to make PACER free to use by 2025.
Applications
Case law databases
Use of tools to aid with legal research is very common within the legal field. Commercial companies such as Practical Law Company, LexisNexis, and Reuters offer services where a lawyer can pay to search case law. In the early 1990s the Cornell Legal Information Institute (ILL) started to provide free of charge full text access to US Supreme Court judgements. A database of Canadian Supreme Court decisions was hosted under the name LexUM. In Australia the AustLII (Australasian Legal Information Institute) was founded in 1995. It was the first free case law database to achieve national coverage and now comprises over 200 databases with case law from virtually all courts and tribunals. The British and Irish Legal Information Institute (BAILII) was established in 1999. These initiatives demonstrated the strong demand for free public access to case law to aid legal research and the Free Access to Law Movement was formally established in 2002. In the US the Caselaw Access Project, run by Harvard Law School, had by 2018 scanned in excess of 40 million legal documents relating to reported US state and federal cases. US case law is made accessible free of charge and via an application programming interface (API).