Supporting the Legal Practitioner : LKBS or Web ? 1

The legal practitioner is a knowledge worker. Two distinct technologies may be of assistance to this type of professional: legal knowledge-based system technology and Internet World Wide Web technology. In this paper we investigate the relation between legal knowledge-based systems and the Internet. Legal knowledge-based systems have long been surrounded by much optimism, but despite the efforts over the last 20 years, the number of practical applications actually in use is still small. On the other hand, the WWW technology, which in a practical form has been around for only a few years, is gaining momentum and is expected to have a serious impact on many fields of society, including the legal domain. We look at both technologies and try to answer the question of where the future of both technologies lies. Computer support for the legal domain Modern professional life without computers is almost unthinkable. With the help of computers and computer networks we are now able to acquire, store, retrieve, process, transport and present information which may be useful for all kinds of decision-making. The value of computers as decision-support systems is now acknowledged in many domains and many persons in very different professions use decision-support systems. The potential of computers has also gained attention in the legal domain. Legal professionals like lawyers, legal scholars and solicitors are aware that computers cannot only serve as word-processors, but may also support legal problem-solving. Legal problem-solving spans a broad spectrum of tasks, ranging from adjudication in Social Welfare (DHSS), resolving civil disputes between parties, to devising the best defence for a suspect in a criminal case. In all cases law has to be applied to the facts, and finding both the facts and the law may be supported by computers. But also the application of Law to the facts may be assisted by computers. With respect to this possibility of assistance to legal professionals in legal problem-solving, two different developments can be noted. On the one hand, for well over 20 years now, research on Legal KnowledgeBased Systems (LKBS) has taken place. One of the driving forces behind LKBS research is the idea of providing legal professionals with adequate information and knowledge to solve problems. Researchers not only try to gain a more fundamental insight into legal reasoning, but they also attempt to develop practical decision-support systems. The success of this applied research, measured in terms of the extent to which applications have been implemented, is 1360-0834/97/030217-12 © 1997 Carfax Publishing Ltd 218 R. Leenes & J. Svensson fairly limited. Only a few systems have found their way to the desk of the legal professional and even fewer have acquired a permanent position. On the other hand, we see a rapid development of telecommunication via computers. The Internet (or the Net) is receiving more and more attention in society. Admittedly, the attention given to the Net in the media by far exceeds the usefulness of the Web at present. Many legal professionals are already showing interest in the Net. And despite the fact that the Net in its current form has only been around for about 4 years, it is already clear that it will only be a matter of a few years before the use of the Net by legal professionals will be standard practice. In this paper we will look into these two technologies and assess the strengths and weaknesses of both for the legal practitioner. We will account for the relative 'failure' of LKBS research and we will show the potential of WWW technology. To set the stage we begin with a short discussion of both technologies. Then, in the third section, we compare them on a number of dimensions relevant to this discussion. In the fourth section we will give some recommendations concerning the road to follow for LKBS researchers and to others working in the domain of legal information systems. And finally, we end with a conclusion and a number of questions for further research. LKBS and the Web: an overview The two technologies we discuss in this paper, legal knowledge-based systems on the one hand and WWW technology on the other, are relatively new. In order to make a comparison possible we will first discuss both of them and see how they have developed. Legal Knowledge-Based Systems Artificial Intelligence (AI) tries to frame intelligent reasoning in computers and to make 'intelligent' computer programs. Very early it was recognized that intelligent performance of both humans and computers requires a great deal of factual knowledge. This means that the development of systems that demonstrate a general (artificial) intelligence would be practically impossible, for they would require enormous knowledge bases. It was thus recognized that AI research should aim at developing more specific systems, confined to domains with limited zones of knowledge. Limitation to a domain reduces the amount of knowledge to be incorporated, which makes it possible to aim for systems which can make expert-like decisions in that domain. These 'expert systems', as they were soon called, are computer programs which are concerned with knowledge domains of limited size. The early results in expert systems such as MYCIN (Buchanan & Shortliffe, 1984) and PROSPECTOR (Hayes-Roth, 1987, p. 287) proved that this idea was very promising. It was believed that expert systems had a glorious future and that they would be of help in many domains. The advances in AI were also expected to produce results in the field of law (Buchanan & Headrick, 1970). It was thought that the formal nature of many legal domains would make them very suitable for representation in expert systems. High hopes were expressed about the possibilities of computer programs that could perform tasks that until then could only be fulfilled by legal