[4]: 1329 Work on making contracts more easy to use involve aspects of user experience design,[5]: 69 and artificial intelligence.
[6] Legal technology traditionally referred to the application of technology and software to help individual lawyers, law firms, medium and large scale businesses with practice management, document automation, document storage, billing, accounting and electronic discovery.
[4]: 1327 The International Conference of Artificial Intelligence and Law (ICAIL) has been held since 1987[4]: 1327 The first commercially available legal AI system was an expert system released in 1988 by the University of Oxford to tell users if a new piece of legislation, the latent damage act applied to them.
[9]: 132 Since 2000, there have been more attempts to make legal tasks easier using machine learning approaches rather than knowledge representation.
[citation needed] In the early 1990s the Cornell Legal Information Institute (ILL) started to provide free of charge full text access to US Supreme Court judgements.
[17] In the US the Caselaw Access Project, run by Harvard Law School, had by 2018 scanned in excess of 40 million legal documents relating to reported US state and federal cases.
US case law is made accessible free of charge and via an application programming interface (API).
[18] Legal technology companies such as LegalZoom and Rocket Lawyer provide consumers and small businesses with document automation services.
The legal document is interactively assembled via a question and answer program, where the user is responding to queries.
[26][25]: 19 Technological approaches are being used to provide guidance for sentencing and pretrial detention in some courts, including machine-learning based solutions which have been criticized for potential racial bias issues.
[27]: 10 [28] Litigation outcome prediction tools have been introduced to the market by the big three legal research providers LexisNexis, Westlaw, and Bloomberg Law.
Although the legal industry was traditionally slow to adopt new technologies, the present legal environment requires greater adaptation to and incorporation of technology,[6] with the American Bar Association voting in August 2012 to amend the Model Rules of Professional Conduct to require lawyers to keep abreast of "the benefits and risks associated with relevant technology",[31][32] and in late 2019, the Federation of Law Societies of Canada adopted a similar amendment to the Model Code of Professional Conduct.
[15] The exponential growth in the volume of documents (mostly email) that must be reviewed for litigation cases has greatly accelerated the adoption of technology used in eDiscovery, with elements of machine language and artificial intelligence being incorporated and cloud-based services being adopted by law firms.