Legal informatics is an area within information science. The American Library Association defines informatics as "the study of the structure and properties of information, as well as the application of technology to the organization, storage, retrieval, and dissemination of information." Legal informatics therefore, pertains to the application of informatics within the context of the legal environment and as such involves law-related organizations (e.g., law offices, courts, and law schools) and users of information and information technologies within these organizations.
Policy issues Policy issues in legal informatics arise from the use of informational technologies in the implementation of law, such as the use of subpoenas for information found in emails, search queries, and social networks. Policy approaches to legal informatics issues vary throughout the world. For example, European countries tend to require the destruction or anonymization of data so that it cannot be used for discovery.
Technology
Cloud computing The widespread introduction of cloud computing provides several benefits in delivering legal services. Legal service providers can use the Software as a Service model to earn a profit by charging customers a per-use or subscription fee. This model has several benefits over traditional bespoke services.
Software as a service is much more scalable. Traditional bespoke models require an attorney to spend more of a limited resource (their time) on each additional client. Using Software as a Service, a legal service provider can put in effort once to develop the product and then use a much less limited resource (cloud computing power) to provide service to each additional customer. Software as a service can be used to complement traditional bespoke services by handling routine tasks, leaving an attorney free to concentrate on bespoke work. Software as a service can be delivered more conveniently because it does not require the legal service provider to be available at the same time as the customer. Software as a service also complicates the attorney-client relationship in a way that may have implications for attorney–client privilege. The traditional delivery model makes it easy to create delineations of when attorney-client privilege attaches and when it does not. But in more complex models of legal service delivery other actors or automated processes may moderate the relationship between a client and their attorney making it difficult to tell which communications should be legally privileged.
Artificial intelligence
Artificial intelligence is employed in online dispute resolution platforms that use optimization algorithms and blind-bidding. Artificial intelligence is also frequently employed in modeling the legal ontology, "an explicit, formal, and general specification of a conceptualization of properties of and relations between objects in a given domain". Artificial intelligence and law (AI and law) is a subfield of artificial intelligence (AI) mainly concerned with applications of AI to legal informatics problems and original research on those problems. It is also concerned to contribute in the other direction: to export tools and techniques developed in the context of legal problems to AI in general. For example, theories of legal decision making, especially models of argumentation, have contributed to knowledge representation and reasoning; models of social organization based on norms have contributed to multi-agent systems; reasoning with legal cases has contributed to case-based reasoning; and the need to store and retrieve large amounts of textual data has resulted in contributions to conceptual information retrieval and intelligent databases.
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