how big data can help legal firm?

Today, we are going to something a little different than our usual learning journey. By that, I mean not purely on information technology but it is somewhat related. Let me explain further. I was reading Malaysia Personal Data Protection Act 2010 or PDPA 2010 on this blog. Legal is not my profession but reading this article from information technology professional, gave several ideas.

Reading this article, no offence, but really is a daunting activity. It is long blogs and dull. :-) nonetheless, every wordings are as equally important to define what is the act should mean and what scope is an act encompasses. I think information retrieval application like elasticsearch would be a match with this. By indexing all the words in the articles and then search quickly and show which act, section and article that reference it. It would be even better with score as more relevant document is shown first. Something the lawyer would probably want to quickly find the relevant document to further read. I'm sure there are books with thousand pages and to remember every single line of the acts is almost impossible or impractical. Information technology will be able to fit for this gap for them.

For law student, this is especially useful as this will speed up the way they learn law. Nobody wanna sit there hours in library and then spend twelves hours a day to read 1000 pages. I think what drive people is we want active learning, not passived reading. So I guess with elasticsearch, they can quickly search with legal terminology and results show them the book that best serve their interest.

For each court cases, transcript or even any text data can be digitize into query-able data. Then with that, data can be turn into information, with information retrieval tools like elasticsearch. I believe a high court case would take months or even year to complete, to quickly digitize these data and be reference upon later down the day, be it during later day of this court case or in the next court case would put law firm into the next stage.

Of cause, this is just my opinion and maybe expressed only from the information technology point of view (as rightfully, I.T. is my profession), please feel free to comment and improve if you find any. Thank you.