Towards an Open Platform for Legal Information

TL;DR

This paper introduces an open source platform for legal information that enhances access, transparency, and development of legal applications by providing a unified technology stack and processing extensive legal data.

Contribution

It presents a novel open platform for legal data that supports scalable access and development of legal tech applications, addressing limitations of existing systems.

Findings

Implemented six technologies for legal data processing

Generated metadata for over 250,000 German legal documents

Enabled access to legal documents and their information

Abstract

Recent advances in the area of legal information systems have led to a variety of applications that promise support in processing and accessing legal documents. Unfortunately, these applications have various limitations, e.g., regarding scope or extensibility. Furthermore, we do not observe a trend towards open access in digital libraries in the legal domain as we observe in other domains, e.g., economics of computer science. To improve open access in the legal domain, we present our approach for an open source platform to transparently process and access Legal Open Data. This enables the sustainable development of legal applications by offering a single technology stack. Moreover, the approach facilitates the development and deployment of new technologies. As proof of concept, we implemented six technologies and generated metadata for more than 250,000 German laws and court decisions. Thus, we can provide users of our platform not only access to legal documents, but also the contained information.