A lawyer directory service using legal documents and profile information as support

This paper describes the use of case laws, dockets as well as other legal publications and attorney profile information to aid the development of a lawyer directory. In order to provide a trustworthy Internet legal research tool, we define a similarity score to represent the match between a lawyer and desired practice experience. The score quantifies the relationship between lawyers and legal experience through litigation records, such as Federal and State cases, as well as profile information, such as published articles in law journals. Relevant documents are linked to different practice areas through an automated classification tool and domain expert mappings. The resulting lawyer-experience mapping enables users to perform an advanced search for lawyers by practice experience in addition to a traditional name search.