Primary and Secondary Law as Data, Versus Text, Make the Law More Accessible

With AI, law, whether code, regs, cases or secondary law in the form of insight from legal professionals, has moved from text to data.

The Santa Fe Institute has a nice explanation of how we now read the law leading off their study on law as data.

“The study of the law requires interacting with that text by reading statutes, regulations, judicial opinions, or other legal sources. For hundreds of years, the process of reading the law began by picking up a book. With the digitization of massive corpora of legal documents, advances in computer hardware, machine learning, and natural language processing techniques have made legal documents a form of “big data.” As a consequence, a new form of “reading”—grounded in quantitative analysis and mathematics—has taken hold. This new form of reading is poised to change how the law is studied and understood by providing fresh perspectives on old questions and spurring entirely new research agendas.”

What’s particularly neat about law as data is that it invites the legal practitioner’s insight in the form of blogs, articles, alerts, white-papers and the like into the law. Preserved and structured, this data will instantly breath life into primary law for the benefit of the legal profession and the public. Something that has never occurred before law as data.