How Legal Informatics Would Change Legal Services

By Nayeon Kim

Nayeon Kim is a freshman at the University of Pennsylvania.

This October, Harvard Law School announced that it would digitize the vast collection of legal books in its library, which includes almost all documentations of judicial decisions made at the state and federal levels since the colonial era. [1] The school plans to scan the collection, which amounts to some 40 million pages, and distribute it on the Internet for free. Many legal experts tout this decision as a landmark in improving access to the legal system because it would make primary legal documents readily available for all, helping public defenders who may not be able to afford commercial information retrieval services to find the information they need.

Although Harvard Law’s decision to open up its legal resources is certainly not a small one, the school’s action is a part of a movement to democratize the practice of law with the help of digital and information technology. Ever since the Internet changed how legal discovery is done, from flipping through the pages of thick case books to finding information online, information technology has been a force seeking to standardize and systemize legal service which has been tailored to the needs of individual clients. [2] For example, legal documents have been prepared by lower-level associates without using any pre-existing, standard format. However, recently a number of legal startups are offering document preparation services involving standardized forms and self-service document creation. For instance, Fairdoc aims to decrease the cost of preparing legal documents by letting clients fill data into pre-existing forms and make some custom adjustments without substantive involvement of legal professionals. Not only standardizing rather routine tasks such as legal discovery and document preparation, information technology is also aiming to influence the analytical core of a lawyer’s work. Ravel, a legal startup focusing on visualizing the relationship between legal cases, which partnered with Harvard to digitize the library, is likely to drive down legal costs by making drawing connections between legal cases easier and more efficient. More experimental projects such as the Hammurabi, the goal of which is to codify certain parts of U.S. law into machine-readable form, also has the potential to make the legal system more accessible by enabling non-professionals to determine on their own what they are required to do according to the law.

Other than decreasing the cost of legal services and making it more accessible, how would the field of legal informatics, defined as the application of information organization, storage, retrieval, and dissemination techniques within the context of the legal environment, change the practice of law? A good framework to analyze the effects of legal informatics appears in a seemingly unrelated book called The World Is Flat by Thomas L. Friedman that discusses the impact of globalization and information technology on the global economy. In the book, Friedman explains that he titled the book The World Is Flat because he believes that the world is becoming flat in a sense, meaning that the barriers to doing something are disappearing and everyone would be  on a level playing field. He supports this claim with a myriad of examples, the most notable of which is that media has become rather democratized with the development of blogging and independent journalism. He states that as the playing field becomes more level, the cost of using the most basic services or technologies would be driven down but value-added services would generate profit. Returning to the media example, Friedman notes that the cost of viewing blog posts is zero but the cost of viewing posts that are proven to be insightful—such as posts in major newspapers and magazines—is high enough to keep media companies running.

The legal services market seems to be following a similar pattern. Although the decline of cost in basic legal services has not entirely materialized yet, the practice of receiving a lot of money—from thousands to millions of dollars—for basic services would not be sustainable in the long run. Legal practice is one of the areas which lags behind other sectors in terms of the degree of integration with information technology [3], and the cost-saving benefits of adopting information technology will pressure law firms to utilize legal informatics when performing certain tasks. For example, Willing, a company that specializes in creating wills, now provides its main services for free but plans to generate profit by providing other services as well. [4] Ravel plans to make Harvard’s primary legal documents searchable on its website but hopes to make money by providing better tools to analyze a given case’s outcome, such as showing how a certain judge has a propensity to make certain decisions. And existing commercial legal information retrieval services such as Westlaw and LexisNexis that charge legal professionals for viewing primary documents say that their business would not be seriously impacted by making these documents free because they provide new ways to find and analyze relevant information in the documents. [5]

So no matter how much legal informatics makes legal services accessible, there still would be services not readily available to everyone and people would have to pay for such services. However, considering that even primary legal documents, which are formally in the public domain, have not been freely available to the public, developments in information technology that makes legal services more efficient and affordable will clearly improve the lives of thousands of Americans who cannot receive fair treatment just because they cannot pay for a lawyer.


[1] Eckholm, Erik. “Harvard Law Library Readies Trove of Decisions fpr Digital Age.” The New York Times, October 28, 2015. http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/29/us/harvard-law-library-sacrifices-a-trove-for-the-sake-of-a-free-database.html?_r=0
[2] Susskind, Richard. “From Bespoke to Commodity.” Legal Technology Journal, Issue 1, 2005. http://www.legaltechnologyjournal.co.uk/content/view/21/51/
[3] “Dan Katz on Legal Informatics, Corporate Law Firm Ownership and 21st Century Legal Education.” Truth on the Market, September 20, 2011. http://truthonthemarket.com/2011/09/20/dan-katz-on-legal-informatics-corporate-law-firm-ownership-and-21st-century-legal-education/
[4] Abramowitz, Zach. “Five Legal Startups You Should Get to Know.” Above the Law, September 29, 2015. http://abovethelaw.com/2015/09/five-legal-startups-you-should-get-to-know/
[5] Eckholm, Erik. “Harvard Law Library Readies Trove of Decisions fpr Digital Age.” The New York Times, October 28, 2015. http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/29/us/harvard-law-library-sacrifices-a-trove-for-the-sake-of-a-free-database.html?_r=0

Photo Credit: Flickr User NKCPhoto

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