The law has always been an attractive domain for language and semantic technologies since it is essential for governance, and it pushes the state of the art in natural language processing (NLP) to its limits. Recent research has highlighted the need to create a bridge between conceptual questions, such as the role of legal interpretation in mining and reasoning, as well as computational and engineering challenges, such as the handling of big legal data and the complexity of regulatory compliance. To facilitate progress towards integrating the efforts on these two objectives, the EU has recently funded several research projects, among which ‘MIREL: MIning and REasoning with Legal texts’—http:// www.mirel proje ct.eu). Researchers in artificial intelligence and law have long worked to bring information mining and reasoning together. More recently, practitioners must effectively use sophisticated natural language processing technology on large volumes of publicly accessible legal texts so as to benefit to society as a whole. The development of such NLP methods and semantic technologies for automatically analysing, indexing, and enriching big data that is freely available on the web has created opportunities for building new approaches to improve the efficiency,