Legal Information Retrieval by Computer : Applications and Implications

It is about fifteen years since Professor Horty and his team at the University of Pittsburgh decided that computers should be enlisted to keep track of the great and constant expansion of legal information. During these years the computer has been applied to modem statutes and to ancient cases; by universities, by professional bodies, by governments and by entrepreneurs; and everywhere from Austria to Australia. Every combination of keywords, abstracts, indices and original text has been tried. They have been stored in a variety of formats for searching in any number of ways to yield output in a myriad of different forms. Enormous sums of money have been spent and aeons of man-years consumed in the creation of notations, languages and programmes. Even in this relatively short period, it can already be said that no one can hope to be fully informed about the developments which have taken place. Certainly no one article can purport to delineate their major features. But the time is appropriate to draw back, to consider what has been achieved, to evaluate it, and to ask what should be done next.