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Computational Law and Expert Systems

Looplex is the first Computational Law platform in Brazil

But what is Computational Law??

To understand what lies behind a true digital legal experience, it is essential to grasp the concept of Computational Law and its applications in automating legal services.

Concept

Computational Law (Direito Computacional) is the branch of legal informatics concerned with the mechanization or automation of legal reasoning1 through the use of systems.

What sets Computational Law systems apart from other areas of legal technology is their autonomy, that is, the ability to respond to legal questions directly to clients or assist legal professionals in building or analyzing content without the need for expert involvement in every individual case.

While there are many possible applications of Computational Law, the most prominent solutions in the market today focus on content automation (petitions, contracts, etc.) and compliance management, i.e., the development and implementation of computer systems capable of assessing, facilitating, or enforcing compliance with rules and regulations.

“Computable” regulations may include the terms of contracts (e.g., delivery schedules, insurance agreements, real estate transactions, financial agreements), corporate policies (e.g., supplier compliance, travel restrictions, expense reporting, pricing rules), and even procedures, arguments, and decisions in judicial or administrative disputes.

Some systems of this kind already exist, and Looplex is a prime example. The potential is particularly significant now due to recent technological advances over the last decade, including the prevalence of the Internet in human interactions and the proliferation of computer systems embedded in all significant legal transactions (such as electronic judicial processes, digital property and business registries, payment systems, digital transactions, accounting, taxation, and fully electronic tax compliance).

Computational Law systems have the potential to bring dramatic changes to our legal system, enhancing the services currently provided by lawyers. They can help companies create better rules and increase their compliance. More broadly, they can provide legal tools to everyone in society, not just legal professionals, thereby increasing access to justice and democratizing Law.

Computational Law systems will not eliminate the need for human legal professionals in the foreseeable future. However, there are many tasks, especially the more repetitive and less intellectually demanding ones, where these systems can offer automated execution as good as or even better than that performed “manually” by humans.

The widespread use of Computational Law can save legal professionals from routine and tedious activities, allowing them to focus on areas where their unique human skills can provide the greatest benefit.

After all, no one should study for years only to spend 80 to 90% of their day copying and pasting, looking for templates, filing documents, logging hours, and tracking deadlines. Rethinking strategies, understanding new challenges in the legal field, and innovating—focusing on the unique or special elements of a case—should be the bulk of a lawyer’s experience!

What Computational Law is NOT

Although Computational Law has multiple practical applications, it is important to keep in mind that not all computer systems and legal technology services are Computational Law applications.

A good example is document management software or case management software. These systems provide significant value to their users, and some even offer semantic “tags” to dramatically improve data search and organization. However, they do not process the content of these documents in a semantically meaningful way, and as a result, human experts are needed to utilize this content.

What distinguishes Computational Law systems from other areas of legal technology is their ability to apply legal rules and strategies to real or hypothetical cases without the input of human specialists in each practical case, as their knowledge has been mapped and converted into a digital format that machines can use to process legal problems.

In other words, with Computational Law systems, it is possible to decouple the specialist from the user at the moment of legal content generation, analysis, and execution. These systems provide answers, not just documents, and perform tasks according to their context. They do this in a partially or fully automated manner.

Opportunities in Computational Law

The implementation of Computational Law systems is providing lawyers with the opportunity to rethink and reimagine their services and business models.

Law firms still package and sell legal services as unified offerings, but this era is coming to an end. Clients will be able to consume services in a fragmented manner, with contract creation, consultancy for a specific interpretation question, or compliance verification handled by multiple providers, including companies not organized as law firms2.

Additionally, automation and technology have the potential to change the role of lawyers, requiring them to oversee and execute services on online systems while doing far less of the relatively repetitive routine work—both tasks directly related to legal practice and support and coordination tasks, also known as legal operations (LegalOps).

Computational Law in Brazil

Computational methods in Law have advanced significantly in recent years and are now on their way to becoming an integral part of legal services in this decade.

This is particularly true in Brazil, which has a well-established logical structure of Law and a legal practice comprising tens of millions of standardized judicial and administrative cases, as well as highly regulated contracts.

Brazil is now one of the largest legal services markets in the world, with low computational complexity for most volume work and the potential for partial automation of more sophisticated cases.

Challenges of Computational Law

The greatest challenge of Computational Law is related to the very nature of Law, which is a complex and adaptive knowledge system.

A simple system has a single path to a single answer. If you want to reach the solution, there is one, and only one, way to do so. A complex system, on the other hand, is one that may have several paths to a single answer.

Dynamic systems are those that change state over time, like a planetary system, while adaptive systems are those that dynamically alter their configurations or reconfigure themselves to adapt their function to some purpose, as is the case with biological systems and human systems, like Law, which is nothing more than a representation of a segmentation of all human interactions.

The problem with complex systems, especially if they are adaptive, is that it is intrinsically impossible to fully model all of their behavior so that it can be simulated in a computer.

To deal with complex adaptive systems like Law, humans have used heuristics for millennia.

A heuristic, or heuristic technique, is an approach to problem-solving or self-discovery using “a calculated guess” derived from past experiences. Heuristics are mental shortcuts that reduce the cognitive load in decision-making. Typically, the opposite process to heuristics is the application of algorithms, where the entire process is explicit.

Much of the “rules” of Law, especially in legislation, are not truly rules; they are heuristics because they contain the description of an abstract behavior that must be applied to a concrete case. They are instructions that humans can execute because they understand context and already have a valuation and general idea of how to apply them. Computers, however, are far more limited. While they process information millions of times faster than a human, they require explicit instructions on how to do things.

Heuristics such as “reduce speed,” “care for the property,” or “pay bills” need to be detailed to extract the concepts and behaviors hidden behind these instructions.

The greatest challenge of Computational Law is that it requires the explicit articulation of concepts and the reduction of intrinsic ambiguities in the current heuristics of written Law in favor of an explicit rule system that can be executed partially or fully algorithmically.

This requires greater logical rigor in describing these rules and an increase by orders of magnitude in the number of rules and concepts associated with a problem.

Implementing legal reasoning mechanization demands:

  • an evolution and specialization of legal professionals, with the emergence of legal engineering; and
  • the use of an expert system for capturing and executing legal content on experience and management platforms.

Expert Systems

The practical implementation of Computational Law systems is carried out through expert systems.

An expert system is a computer system that emulates the decision-making ability of a human expert. Expert systems are designed to solve complex problems by reasoning through bodies of knowledge, primarily represented as IF-THEN rules, rather than using conventional procedural programming code.

In the legal field, a legal expert system is an expert system that uses Computational Law to emulate part of the human expert’s abilities in interacting with users to build content, execute workflows, or perform data analysis.

Legal expert systems employ a rule base or knowledge base and an inference engine to accumulate, reference, and produce specialized knowledge on specific subjects within the legal domain.

With the use of expert systems, it becomes possible to manage the vast expansion of legal knowledge that must be made explicit for the practical application of Computational Law. They enable:

  • faster provision of legal advice and consultancy
  • reduced time spent on repetitive and labor-intensive legal tasks
  • development of knowledge management techniques that institutionalize legal procedures and services
  • increased access to legal services by decoupling and automating the interaction between specialists and users
  • reduced overhead and labor costs for greater profitability of law firms and savings in legal departments
  • lower fees for clients alongside greater financial results for lawyers

Legal expert systems can also support administrative processes, facilitating decision-making, automating rule-based analyses, and exchanging information directly with users.

Looplex is the first legal expert system in Brazil to deliver all of this within a digital experience platform (DXP) model, offering content automation, case management, and data analysis for users while providing an environment for the development, maintenance, and management of the digital legal knowledge base.

Footnotes

  1. Term popularized in academia by Stanford University’s CodeX as a differentiation from Legal Informatics. For more information, read Genesereth, Michael R.: “What Is Computational Law?,” Complaw Corner, Codex: The Stanford Center for Legal Informatics, 2021, https://law.stanford.edu/2021/03/10/what-is-computational-law/

  2. These are Alternative Legal Service Providers (ALSPs), already present in several countries.