Legal informatics

Advances in technology and legal informatics have led to the creation of new models for the provision of legal services. Traditionally, legal services are a “custom-made” product created by a professional lawyer individually for each client. ^[1] However, for more efficient operation, part of these services will be transferred sequentially from (1) provided “on order” to (2) standardized, (3) systematized, to (4) goods sold by “packages”, and, finally, ( 5) ordinary goods on the market ^[1] . The transition from one stage to another requires the development of various technologies and knowledge systems ^[1] .

Cloud Computing and Legal Services

The widespread adoption of cloud computing offers several advantages in providing legal services. Legal service providers can use the “ software as a service” model, which allows you to make a profit by charging a subscription fee or a fee for each use of the software from clients. This model has several advantages compared to traditional custom-made legal services.

• The software as a service model is much more scalable . Traditional “custom-made” models require that a lawyer spend on each additional client more than a limited resource (his time). Using “software as a service”, a legal service provider can make an effort to develop a product and then use a much less limited resource (the power of cloud computing) to provide services to each additional client.
• “Software as a service” can be used in addition to traditional “custom-made” services by processing routine tasks, giving the attorney the opportunity to focus on individual work.
• “Software as a service” is more convenient in delivery and delivery, since it does not require the client and legal services provider to be available at the same time.

On the other hand, “software as a service” complicates the relationship between an attorney and a client, in particular, eroding the concept of advocate secrecy and introducing, to one degree or another, the uncertainty of the guarantee of its preservation. The traditional model of the provision of lawyer services provides clear boundaries when lawyer confidentiality is respected by the legal services provider and when not. But in more complex models of providing legal services, automated processes are involved in the process, which are supported by third parties, which can reduce the transparency of relations and raise the question of maintaining the privacy of communications between the client and the lawyer ^[2] .

Hidden Markets

Since the traditional model of delivery services required all legal work to be done on order, the provision of legal services is generally inelastic . The traditional model does not cover households that are not eligible for legal assistance and, at the same time, cannot easily use individual legal services. Thus, the report of the American Bar Association Standing Committee on Legal Services states that “among middle-income households, 39% use the legal system to try to solve their legal problems, 23% try to resolve them without resorting to legal assistance, and 26% are inactive ” ^[3] . New legal service providers are seeking access to this limited hidden market, using technology to lower the price of their services and increase their availability ^[4] .

Online Legal Services

The spread of the Internet and the development of legal technologies and computer science expand the range of legal services for individuals, as well as small and medium-sized businesses.

United States

In 1995, the business project online legal information service where users can search for lawyers, discuss legal topics in an open forum, and order legal forms.

In 1999, the private corporation LegalMatch launched an online legal service: the user answers questions, identifies the required service and notifies lawyers of the required profile, the user receives answers from lawyers and decides which one to hire.

In 2001, the online legal documentation service began to work. Users can create legal documents for personal and business use by answering an online questionnaire and purchasing a completed document.

In 2008, the online service began to provide legal, users to use the legal documentation service or the call back service by phone to consult with lawyers on personal and business needs, subject to a monthly or annual monthly fee.

In 2012, the project launched a mobile legal documentation service with which users can create simple legal agreements through a mobile application.

Japan

In 2005, Japanese lawyer Taichiro Moto founded Authense Group, Inc. and launched the online legal service Bengoshi.com. ^[5] Users of the service can search for lawyers, ask legal questions and receive answers from specialists in an open forum, request an assessment of legal services, and consult with lawyers on personal and business issues.

Obstacles to providing legal Internet services

The use of currently available legal technologies and processes makes legislative barriers in different countries more difficult. For example, in different states of the United States there are different legal rules, which makes it difficult to conduct such a business simultaneously in several jurisdictions. Also, in a number of legislations there is the concept of “unauthorized provision of legal services”, and only certified specialists attached to certain territories can practice law. Thus, entrepreneurs developing legal services may themselves be outside the legal field, and the concept of “legal practice” as applied to such services becomes vague ^{[6] [7] [8]} .

Access to Legal Information

Since the mid-1990s, lawyers, developers and publishers began to disseminate legal information through the World Wide Web. Especially influential was the (FALM) movement, which by 2014 included 54 national and regional organizations. In 2002, the FALM adopted the “Declaration on Free Access to Law”. The purpose of this movement was to ensure free and equal access to legal information for all. The Declaration declared public legal information the universal heritage of mankind.

FALM member organizations, primarily through the Internet, disseminate primary and secondary legal information widely. Early examples include the Cornell University and the , based on the University of Technology and the University of New South Wales, which at the dawn of the Internet introduced hypertext technology to represent laws as a network of sites, each of which represents a particular section ^{[9] [10]} .

The work on open access to the legal movement is now published in the Journal of Open Access to Law , this journal was founded in 2013 ^[11] .

The FALM movement served as a catalyst for expanding the practice of official open access to legal information on the Internet by government agencies themselves ^{[9] [10]} .

Access to Justice

Lawyers, designers, and computer scientists have examined ways to use technology to improve non-lawyers' access to justice ^{[12] [13]} .

The Design Institute and (both at the Illinois Institute of Technology ) for many years studied the experience of plaintiffs who independently represented themselves in court. The result of this work was a report prepared by 2002, in which the results of their studies of the existing legal assistance systems were recorded, and the creation of a new development protocol and a plan for developing a new system were proposed ^[14] . The report also outlines a number of conceptual innovations, rethinking how the judicial system can work, and users can access it. Some of their suggestions include:

• CourtNet, a network within the courthouse to link judicial staff and the public;
• Interactive translator, a software tool that can be used in interviewing and exchanging information between courts, can translate oral and text messages into various languages;
• "Archetypes", a diagnostic platform that models the legal problems of users, classifies them and offers referral services;
• “Harassment evaluator,” an online tool that allows potential parties to assess whether prosecution will be worth their time, money, and effort.
• “Compiler of complaints”, an electronic interface that allows parties to extract data from their problem situation and collect it into various legal documents;
• Informer, software that uses case examples to help parties model their own forms and teaches them how to write; and
• “Case Tracker”, an interactive archive with the ability to search the history of the trial with a clear timeline and links to previous actions.

at Harvard Law School is working with a Massachusetts judge, Dina Fane, to create access to state civil justice for individuals who represent themselves in court, low-income people, non-English speakers, and people with disabilities ^[15] .

CodeX, the Stanford Center for Legal Informatics, supports projects such as and aimed at using legal informatics to access justice, and forms a community that brings together researchers, lawyers, entrepreneurs, and technologists who push boundaries legal technologies ^[16] .

Issues of law and policy in legal informatics are related to the use of information technology in the execution of the law, for example, the use of notifications regarding information found in email, search queries and social networks. Strategic approaches to legal informatics are different in different countries, for example, in European countries, as a rule, they require the destruction or anonymization of data so that they cannot be used for identification ^[17] .

Digital Rights Management and Copyright

Rights holders use Digital Rights Management (DRM) technology to limit the use and dissemination of digital content. In the United States, an anti-circumvention of the Digital Age Copyright Act (DMCA) criminalizes attempts to circumvent DRM protection, even in cases where the circumvention is only intended to facilitate fair use of content. Along with anti-circumvention, DRM may reject other rights, such as fair use rights ^[18] .

Legal informatics in legal practice

Within the conceptual area of ​​practice, progress continues, both in litigation and in technology-focused transactions. In particular, technology involving predictive coding can provide a significant increase in efficiency in legal practice. Although predictive coding is largely used in litigation, this technology is beginning to penetrate into the practice of transactions, where it is used to improve the review of documents during mergers and acquisitions ^[19] . Other developments, including XML coding in transactional contracts, and increasingly sophisticated document preparation systems demonstrate the importance of legal informatics in the field of transaction law ^{[20] [21]} .

Artificial intelligence is already used in online dispute resolution platforms where optimization algorithms and blind rates are used, and in the future it can be used much more widely ^[22] . Artificial intelligence is also often used in modeling legal ontology , “an explicit, formal and general specification of the conceptualization of properties and relations between objects in a given field” ^[23] .

There are both academic and patented quantitative models of legal forecasting. One of the earliest examples of a working quantitative model of legal forecasting occurred took place in the form of a forecast projection of the US Supreme Court . The prediction of the outcome model of all cases in the Supreme Court in 2002 turned out to be true in 75% of cases, unlike experts who correctly predicted the outcome of only 59.1% of cases ^[24] . Another example of the academic model of quantitative legal forecasting is the 2012 model, which predicted the outcome of lawsuits related to violations in the course of operations with securities ^[25] . There are also technology startups whose authors are attempting to create their own forecasting models, one example is ^[26] , a company that provides data and analytics on intellectual property .

In 1995, Peter W. Martin published a publication under the NCAIR-sponsored Future of Legal Information Technology program. Статья была озаглавлена «Цифровые права: некоторые предположения о будущем правовых информационные технологии», и Мартин в ней задался вопросом, как технологические инновации формируют — и будут формировать в дальнейшем — поток юридической информации, её хранение и организацию ^[27] . Другими словами, Мартин задавался вопросом, как технология изменит фундаментальный характер и практику правового поля в Соединенных Штатах. Мартин писал, что «существует мощная (но нечасто замечаемая) связь между подходами общества к законодательству и технологиями, использующимися при оперировании и распространении закона» ^[28] .

Мартин писал свою статью вскоре после запуска Института правовой информации в Корнелле, первого юридического сервере в Интернете. LEXIS впервые разместила цифровой юридический контент на компьютерах, и затем цифровой контент занял более 50 % рынка юридической информации ^[28] . Мартин попросил читателей отринуть недоверие, допустив относительно быстрые сдвиги в соотношении юридической информации на бумаге с цифровой юридической информацией. Инициатива будет переходить от дорогостоящих «привратников» из частного сектора, владеющих юридической информацией, к жаждущей базовых знаний общественности, повышающей свои навыки, информированность и квалификацию в юридических вопросах ^[28] .

Мартин предложил «более полные» сведения, указывая на случай, когда суд подробно обсуждал декор торговой марки ресторана, так и не продемонстрировав при этом фотографии декора ^[28] . Мартин также обращает внимание на базу данных статистики наказаний, используемую при вынесении приговоров в Новом Южном Уэльсе, и сравнивает её с Федеральными руководящими принципами вынесения приговоров в Соединенных Штатах ^[28] . Модель Южного Уэльса, стартовавшая в 1990 году, позволяет судьям получать доступ не только к более традиционным юридическим данным, включая нормативные положения и апелляционные решения, но также к наличию альтернативных возможностей (таких как программы реабилитации наркоманов) ^[28] . Кроме того, «Статистическая база данных о наказаниях» предоставляет судьям доступ к предварительно проанализированному пулу решений и приговоров, вынесенных другими должностными лицами в Новом Южном Уэльсе, а также к полной информации о преступлениях и преступниках ^[28] . Далее Мартин отмечает использование графического дисплея, чтобы сделать информацию, содержащуюся в базе данных, более наглядной и удобной для использования судьями.

Рассмотрение правовой информатики как области знаний и серьёзного инструмента для изменения способа взаимодействия людей с законом может проложить путь для радикальных инноваций в областях права, по своей сути традиционно воспринимаемых как статичные, иерархизированные и забюрокраченные.

Сегодняшние корпоративные юридические отделы — это организации, которые могут не уступать по размерам, крупнейшим юридическим фирмам. Таким образом, использование различных технологий правовой информатики важно для их успеха. Юридические отделы используют, среди прочего, различные технологии, помогающие в управлении своими базами данных документов и более продвинутыми активами, такими как патентные портфели. Некоторые юридические отделы также экспериментируют с автоматизацией решения определённых видов задач, выполняемых адвокатами компании в их повседневной практике. Эти задачи включают в себя: подготовку документов, их редактирование и кастомизацию, управление подписями.

Существующая парадигма корпоративного управления , особенно когда речь идет о публичных компаниях , во многом основана на представлении об относительной эффективности разделения собственности и контроля в управлении бизнес-корпорациями ^[29] . Однако технологические изменения могут повлиять на равновесие оптимальной структуры управления для отдельных фирм. Например, за счёт снижения стоимости распространения информации среди акционеров и сбора данных об их предпочтениях, развитие коммуникационных технологий может потенциально сделать предпочтительным для некоторых фирм организовать управление фирмой таким образом, который более сходен, например, с прямой демократией, с такими функциями, как двусторонняя связь между топ-менеджментом компании и её инвесторами.. Таким образом, изучение подобных вопросов выведет правовую информатику к анализу взаимосвязи между технологиями и структурами корпоративного управления.

• Erdelez, S. Legal informatics: application of information technology in law (англ.) // Annual Review of Information Science and Technology : journal. — 1997. — Vol. 32 . — P. 367—402 .
• А.В. Грачева. От правовой информатики до Legal Tech: история развития в России и за рубежом // Закон. 2019. №05

• Вычислительное право
• Приложения искусственного интеллекта к правовой информатике