This course will teach students how to design legal information systems, integrating expert systems, hypertext, text retrieval and other technologies, for use in generating legal documents from precedents and assisting users to navigate solutions to legal problems. After learning the necessary skills, students will work in small groups, in partnership with a not-for-profit centre or organisation, to design and build a legal information system.

In class, students will also be exposed to a variety of examples of automation of legal tasks, and the various legal and practical issues associated with their use, including issues of professional regulation. This will include guest lectures from those working on legal expert systems and related technologies. Students will also become familiar with theoretical approaches to legal information systems development, and the range of technologies and approaches that may contribute to applications development.

Designing legal information systems requires students to think through a class of legal problems in a structured way. Systems can be used to generate legal documents from precedents, with variations based on the responses of a user, as well as to answer legal questions within a particular field. They are one component of the increasing tendency to automate legal tasks. Used well, legal information systems can facilitate access to legal information and expertise, but always within the limits of their designer's foresight. Designing a good legal information system thus requires skills in legal analysis and problem-solving, as well as the ability to think creatively and explore different approaches to a problem.

This course does not require students to have any pre-existing skills or experience in expert systems or computer programming - the course itself includes instruction on how to use expert system software.

This course is sponsored by Gilbert and Tobin.

More information can be found on the Course Outline Website.