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Summary
This event would undoubtedly present Slovenia as one of the leading member states within the EU (together with Italy, Austria, Netherlands) with regards to implementation of new information technologies within the legal sector. The timing of the conference would coincide with the latter half of Slovenia's EU presidency term. Some of the most recognized legal IT professionals from around Europe and beyond would present the latest developments within this highly specialized field. They would talk about theoretical and practical benefits of legal IT automation including artificial intelligence modules which are bound to simplify and standardize legislative processes.
Of all the professional activities, it is the practice of law which lends itself best to extensive application of new information technologies within its processes. This includes implementation of artificial intelligence modules which would ensure automatic recognition of legal rules and concepts as well as mutual relationships. Each legal term or concept would be precisely defined, evaluated, reusable, unique and identifiable. There would be no superfluous legal talk involved.
Digitalization and general automation of legal practice has evolved considerably in many parts of the world and it is clear even now that the overall development is leading toward semantic recognition of the content. Advanced linguistic modules are already in use and this is the right time for the legal community to embrace new technology and standardize legal rules in order to help IT professionals produce expert systems and other tools for efficient practice.
Once complete sets of laws and judicial decisions of a certain jurisdiction are processed and analyzed by the latest legal IT tools, the law itself will start evolving in a more coherent, efficient way. The sheer volume of processed legal content containing metadata will allow for creation of definitive, conclusive and universal repositories of legal knowledge.
Special legal content management systems which would be used by legislators will provide better quality law-making. Subjectivity and usage of narrative style would be eliminated. At the same time the legal terms used would be unequivocal and definite. Extensive use of metadata attached to original legal texts would ensure uniformity of meaning and reduce the need for complex statutory interpretation techniques. Such metadata would carry information on mutual relationships of legal concepts and terms, cross-referential data, hierarchical dependencies. This framework could also help with comparative analysis of legal concepts from different jurisdictions especially in multilingual environments such as the European Union.
The science of legal IT would reach all new heights thanks to advanced products and services such as legal search engines which will use natural language queries to return relevant results. In addition, legal thesauri, ontologies and semantic webs would complement legal research and offer integrated contextual information.
Smart legal expert systems will become ubiquitous across the legal environment and will bear no resemblance to early attempts at providing automated legal advice. They will be affordable, self-learning devices networked together within highly intensive administrative and judicial workflows.
As it is already noticeable, more and more administrative tasks are performed electronically. E-administration includes not only submission of data, forms and other documents but also electronic processing as well as production and issuance of different certificates and licences. The technology behind e-services is largely based on artificial intelligence. For example, various types of AI modules would enable judges to become much more efficient within the judicial process. Draft judgments would be produced by expert systems and only finalized and approved manually. This would dramatically increase the volume of cases a single judge could handle satisfactorily.
Another positive aspect of AI based legal expert systems is in that they could perform pre-screening of potential legal actions. In other words, many cases could be dropped even before they come to the court thanks to the advice provided by such expert systems. Simply, the system would predict applicant's (palintiff's) chances of winning in advance based on available facts. Of course, this would bring huge savings in time and money not only to parties involved but the legal system as a whole. Alternative dispute resolution (ADR) would grow ever more popular and would be conducted electronically.
It is difficult to disagree that AI in law would affect the legal practice in two major ways: economically and quality wise. Judicial proceedings would become shorter and much less expensive and the legislation and case law would become more consistent and more just.
The law as we know it would irreversibly change for the better.
Themes and topics - proposal
Vir, 2.11.2006 Anton Tomažič
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