Online Legal Services: A Critique

I’ve just come across a Ph.D. thesis from 2007 by Christine Vanda Burns called “Online Legal Services — A Revolution that Failed?” [PDF 729pp]. Dr. Burns looked at what we might think of as the first generation of “online legal products which ‘package’ legal knowledge” and supply it to commercial enterprises, governments, and other consumers of law. As you would imagine in a dissertation, she examined the relevant literature and also did some empirical work in Australia, her home.

Interesting, to me, is her conclusion that while there are lots of difficulties surrounding the implementation of such products, most could be overcome with the application of understood techniques; however, the real stumbling block is the problem of acquiring the legal knowledge in the first place, a problem she labels the “knowledge acquisition bottleneck.” It’s worth quoting her at some length on this:

A significant lesson that emerges from each of the lines of inquiry I have pursued is that knowledge acquisition is a very significant impediment to the cost effective development of online legal knowledge products. Codifying legal knowledge and representing it using a technology tool is extremely difficult. This translates to considerable time and expense. The importance of this factor is not reflected in the commentary about online legal knowledge products, suggesting that it has been consistently underestimated. Presumably the lack of interaction between the academic and commercial worlds, and the small number of commercial developers has led to a situation where it is a lesson learned in isolation by each newcomer to the development of knowledge-based applications.

Some aspects of the knowledge acquisition bottleneck are common to all types of online legal knowledge product. For example, legal experts are often poor at articulating their knowledge and it may be the case that much of their knowledge cannot be articulated. This is compounded by the challenge of finding a legal expert who is willing to spend time distilling their knowledge. It is very different to traditional legal work and may hold little inherent interest for most lawyers. In addition, for many lawyers their time can be more lucratively devoted to providing traditional legal services.

. . . The knowledge acquisition bottleneck is a consistent theme of the artificial intelligence and law literature. . . . Knowledge of the relevant area of law must be translated into segments of material that are digestible, can be interacted with and are imparted in an order that results in effective learning. The skill required to do this is frequently underestimated, as is the time required to carry out the process of instructional design. Similarly, the process of converting legal expertise into an automated legal document is demanding. It requires not only legal expertise, but also the ability to create a base document, the ability to deconstruct the base document so that it can be logically assembled later, and the ability to use authoring software to convert the deconstructed document into an automated document.

None of this will come as a surprise to the KM experts, as Burns repeatedly acknowledges. So before we launch into rhapsodies about the (continually) coming revolution in legal services, we should bear in mind that that it’s difficult indeed to decant lawyers’ “knowledge” into any flasks, let alone automated ones. Still, there are systematizers among us — I’m one, at heart — who are (continually) intrigued by the possibilities and will keep chipping away at the problem — and at the “knowing” lawyers.

[via @darrylmountain]