Semi-Automated Legal Decision Support

The open access of citizens to public information is regulated by the Access to Information Act through Law no. 12527 of 18 November 2011, rooted in article 216 of the Constituicao da Republica Federativa do Brasil de 1988: “[...] mudanca de paradigma ao estabelecer que o acesso e a regra e o sigilo, a excecao". Within the judicial branch, the main focus of this project, this is guarded both at local as well as at national level. More verbose explanations are available. This document reports the design of a legal decision support system, for the Brazilian judicial branch, with possible applications to other domains. The main source of data for the system are documents describing the proceedings of lawsuits. We denominate these documents as Legal Event from the Past (LEP) throughout the report. For the development of an early version of the system, or what may be denoted as prototype, we focus on local, i.e., state courts, in a way that enables extensions of the system for processing LEPs regardless of their origin. For comparative purposes, as well as for ensuring scalability of the prototype, several other judicial authorities are considered.