Legal expert system

A legal expert system is a domain-specific expert system that uses artificial intelligence to emulate the decision-making abilities of a human expert in the field of law.:172 Legal expert systems employ a rule base or knowledge base and an inference engine to accumulate, reference and produce expert knowledge on specific subjects within the legal domain. A legal expert system is a domain-specific expert system that uses artificial intelligence to emulate the decision-making abilities of a human expert in the field of law.:172 Legal expert systems employ a rule base or knowledge base and an inference engine to accumulate, reference and produce expert knowledge on specific subjects within the legal domain. It has been suggested that legal expert systems could help to manage the rapid expansion of legal information and decisions that began to intensify in the late 1960s. Many of the first legal expert systems were created in the 1970s:179 and 1980s.:928 Lawyers were originally identified as primary target users of legal expert systems.:3 Potential motivations for this work included: Some early development work was oriented toward the creation of automated judges.:386 Later work on legal expert systems has identified potential benefits to non-lawyers as a means to increase access to legal knowledge.:4 Legal expert systems can also support administrative processes, facilitating decision making processes, automating rule-based analyses and exchanging information directly with citizen-users. Rule-based expert systems rely on a model of deductive reasoning that utilizes 'if A, then B' rules. In a rule-based legal expert system, information is represented in the form of deductive rules within the knowledge base. Case-based reasoning models, which store and manipulate examples or cases, hold the potential to emulate an analogical reasoning process thought to be well-suited for the legal domain. This model effectively draws on known experiences our outcomes for similar problems.:5 A neural net relies on a computer model that mimics that structure of a human brain, and operates in a very similar way to the case-based reasoning model. This expert system model is capable of recognizing and classifying patterns within the realm of legal knowledge and dealing with imprecise inputs.:18