The justice system in the USA is modeled on that of the UK: The rule base is made up of common law derived from cases and statutes. The US system differs, though, because it is controlled by a written Constitution that sets out the operation of the courts and controls some of the core relationships between people and government. In all serious criminal cases where the government is the plaintiff, the accused are generally entitled by the Constitution to free representation by appointed lawyers. However, there is no corresponding constitutional right to representation by lawyers in civil cases.

When arguing before a judicial body, lawyers must support their legal arguments by citing prior court decisions that adopted similar reasoning or reached a similar conclusion. Finding such prior decisions is often a tedious and time-consuming process that requires many hours of reading through judicial opinions to determine if they are actually relevant, and then drawing parallels to those few decisions that are most relevant. Many attorneys employ paralegals and junior associates to conduct legal research on a full-time basis, so any system that makes it quicker and easier for attorneys to locate relevant cases and statutes can save enormous amounts of time and money.

One concept that has seized the popular imagination is the idea of the digital judge. There is something intuitively appealing about the concept that one day our unruly, chaotic human disputes will be resolved by the cool, all-knowing rationality of a fair and impartial electronic decision maker. While the concept may be enticing, this leap from human-powered justice to electronic justice is a pretty big one. Much like the concept of self-driving cars or watches we can talk into, many people seem to have concluded that this future is inevitable, even when we don’t yet have the technology that could make it come to pass. Right now we’re just biding time, waiting for the future to arrive.

The advent of distributed ledger technology has challenged the legal community to learn how technology will change law, finance, and commerce in coming years. Blockchain technology, a method for storing data in cryptographically secure distributed ledgers, has spread all over the world and into nearly every vertical as global commerce searches for secure tools that support ecosystem-wide growth. The World Economic Forum estimates that by 2026, 10% of global commerce will be conducted on blockchain systems.1 Blockchain technology promises to bring more legal relationships into the realm of data and code, so there is a clear need for legal minds to help guide this development.

Throughout the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, the world witnessed exponential growth in the amount of information collected, stored, and analyzed. Not unrelatedly, the cost of storing, analyzing, and transmitting information has fallen exponentially during the same period, resulting in substantially greater access to and awareness of data. A few hundred years ago, the cost of storing the sum of written human knowledge exceeded the budgets of all but the very wealthiest institutions; today, the body of all written human knowledge can be accessed by a device that nearly half of the world’s population carries in their pocket. As a result, people have become somewhat desensitized to the purpose and presence of data in modern society. In order to understand the purpose of the data and knowledge we have accrued and stored – and which is intrinsically linked to informatics – it is useful to look back to a time when knowledge was genuinely scarce and expensive to access. To understand informatics, we must understand the importance of writing and knowledge systems through history.

Understanding what happens at scale in our judicial systems seems a relatively simple problem, but has proved difficult in the past due to the inability of practitioners to access the needed information. In this chapter, we examine bankruptcy case information made available by the Federal Judicial Center in 2017 and use that data to understand the difficulty Chapter 13 bankruptcy filers have in obtaining their bankruptcy discharge, the potential factors that correlate with obtaining a discharge, and to predict how likely a specific case is to succeed. We discuss a project conducted using data from over 700,000 cases, as well as examine much smaller data sets suitable for manipulation using Excel.

The law is not free in either sense of the word: It is costly to access, and there are restrictions on its use. An ideal system would allow any member of the public free online access to all official primary law – cases, statutes, and regulations. In the twenty-first century, a digital-first court publishing system, and primary law in general, should be online, free, open, comprehensive, official, citable, and machine-readable. A modern online law system should also have eight additional, more specific characteristics: digital signing, versioning, good structure, medium-neutrality, archives, a search function, bulk conveyance, and an application program interface (API).1 Unfortunately, such an ideal system remains a distant aspiration in most jurisdictions.

Document assembly, the computer-assisted generation of texts, is a form of automation with wide applicability in law. Most legal tasks involve document preparation. Drafting effective texts is central to lawyering, judging, legislating, and regulating. The best way to support that work with intelligent tools is an ancient topic in legal informatics circles. This chapter surveys the history and current state of the legal document assembly field and reviews the typical concepts, features, and development processes involved. It describes illustrative applications of document drafting software and the knowledge representations and interfaces they leverage.

Somewhere between sonnets and Beat literature lies the notion of the semi-structured document, in which some type of, if not formalized, than perhaps anticipated, or at least understandable, textual layout, sectioning, and various forms of visual and labeled elements assist the reader in deciphering the document’s meaning. In fact, had the publisher been able to accommodate it, Faulkner had hoped to publish his masterpiece, The Sound and the Fury, in various colored text, each color denoting a different period of time, in order to assist the reader in making sense of what might otherwise be viewed as incoherent ramblings coming through his severely mentally disabled character’s narrative.2 And such is the current fate and ongoing dilemma facing a legal system that has historically been centered on the static, written document, collecting dust if lucky enough to be on a shelf, rather than buried in a random box under a desk in a remote office, yet all the while holding forth the rules and consequences of not abiding its every word and punctuation mark, scribbler’s errors included. This is the glue that holds society together.

The past decade has seen an increase in conversations about innovation in law, with a focus on how new technology can make the legal system more efficient and effective. Legal technology, in the form of artificial intelligence (AI), data analytics, and mobile applications, has been heralded as bringing a new era of legal services. This chapter advocates for a distinct but complementary approach to legal innovation, based in human-centered design, which can create new non-technological innovations and improve how lawyers and laypeople engage with legal technology. If a technology-driven approach focuses on how to make systems more intelligent and more efficient, a design-driven approach focuses on how to make systems that people want to use, are able to use, and that give them value.

The storage, description, collection, organization, and selection of legal information is central to a legal system, whether public or private, professional or lay person, structured or unstructured, textual or non-textual. The ability to get timely information where it is needed is as important to law as it is to any other field, given that law is a system of written rules and procedures. Ignorantia juris non excusat – ignorance of the law is no excuse. But where citizens seek to know the law and cannot find it, they have a right to question its legitimacy, at least as applied to them. The function of the reference librarian within a brick and mortar library, while still invaluable, does not scale to the magnitude of the problem. Technological information intermediation, such as a search engine, can thus be increasingly viewed as a necessary component of a modern legal system, and familiarity with the basic concepts is an important tool in the legal technologist’s toolkit.