Introduction to the special issue on legal text analytics

Recent developments in large-scale storage capabilities and related advances in legal data analytics have created unprecedented tools for identifying patterns—such as statistical, semantic, citation-based, and temporal structure—in large legal data repositories. These developments are leading to new insights into both the interconnections among authoritative legal texts and the behavior of courts, legislatures, lawyers, and other legal professionals. Historically, Artificial Intelligence and Law conferences like the ICAIL (International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Law) series sponsored by the IAAIL (International Association for Artificial Intelligence and Law) have focused more on argumentation and inference than on empirical and corpora-based approaches to legal analysis and problem solving. However, the rapid growth in new data-centric techniques has opened the door to dramatically new algorithmic approaches for legal problem solving and analysis. This special issue of the AI and Law journal presents four papers that exemplify these recent trends. Initial versions of all but one of these papers were presented at