Introduction: Law, Information Technology, and Artificial Intelligence
INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY AND LAWYERS: ADVANCED TECHNOLOGY IN THE LEGAL DOMAIN, FROM CHALLENGES TO DAILY ROUTINE, Arno R. Lodder and Anja Oskamp, eds., Springer, 2006
22 Pages Posted: 8 Dec 2008
Date Written: December 5, 2008
Abstract
Information Technology and lawyers, at first sight not the most natural combination one can think of. Information Technology is fast, schematic, and futuristic; lawyers are cautious, verbose, and old-fashioned. When one of the authors once told a chemist he was working in the field of IT and Law, the first reaction was: "Is there any connection between the two at all?" This was back in 1995. The influence of IT and in particular the Internet on law has become ever greater since, and also the use of IT and in particular the Internet by lawyers (the side of the IT and Law diptych this book focuses on) has increased significantly. Currently there is indeed a connection between IT and Law that is also clear to people outside the field, viz. IT plays a central role in law, legal practice, and legal research
The remainder of this chapter is structured as follows. First we shed some further light on the two sides of IT and Law (1.2), followed by an introduction of some basic concepts that will be used throughout the book (1.3). We continue with a taxonomy of the different types of IT support for lawyers (1.4). Subsequently the domains of Artificial Intelligence (1.5) and AI and Law (1.6) are introduced. Section 1.7 describes a recent development that brings together the previously mostly separately studied legal and technical angle of IT and Law: the two areas are converging into one topic of research in several current studies. The structure of the book is discussed in Section 1.8.
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