Search Engines Don’t Understand Lawyers, but Smart Technologies Can Improve Access to Legal Information

Abstract

This article aims to describe some of the reasons why the legal community does not seem to be able to take full advantage of the dazzling developments in information retrieval, including those related to artificial intelligence and data science. To demonstrate how progress can be made, a project from the Netherlands is showcased which aims to link legal documents from different sources with the aim to improve effectiveness and quality of legal search.

Keywords: Reference Detection, ECLI, Case Law Database, Information Retrieval, Network Analysis

JEL Classification: K00