Traditional software architecture and web technologies have been used for tasks like providing access to case law.
[6]: 69 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.
[2][7]: 83 Since 2011, Legal Tech has evolved to be associated more with technology startups disrupting the practice of law by giving people access to online software that reduces or in some cases eliminates the need to consult a lawyer, or by connecting people with lawyers more efficiently through online marketplaces and lawyer-matching websites.
[1] In the 2010s tech companies specializing in helping consumers bring claims against traders made legal technology a mass phenomenon.
Spearheads of consumer legal tech are Flightright and Fairplane, both specialize in enforcing air passenger rights under the EU's Flight Compensation Regulation.
[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.
[15] 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).
[16] 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.
[24][23]: 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.
[25]: 10 [26] Litigation outcome prediction tools have been introduced to the market by the big three legal research providers LexisNexis, Westlaw, and Bloomberg Law.
[3] In addition, there are increasing incentives for lawyers to become technologically competent, 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",[29][30] and in late 2019, the Federation of Law Societies of Canada adopted a similar amendment to the Model Code of Professional Conduct.