If you work in the legal profession or if you’ve had to take advantage of legal services, then you know how important research is. Research can tell you if an opinion is on the right track. It can help you see if a contract you’re working on has any phrases from others you can use and offer sound legal insights.
The traditional way of searching for specific words or phrases may be stilted. It may not be how they are used in contracts or law, complicating matters significantly. Thus, you need to train lawyers in writing queries in a language that the machine can understand.
Without using technology, legal research can be onerous. Fortunately, emerging advances in NLP legal tech have the potential to take law research to new, groundbreaking levels.
What is NLP?
NLP stands for Natural Language Processing. It can find answers to legal questions on databases and online using natural language instead of complex queries. As a result, it holds much promise to make legal research much more effortless.
Natural Language Processing is a subfield of artificial intelligence (AI) and draws from computer science and linguistics. It aims to make computers read, interpret and even write human language.
As a lawyer, imagine if you could read thousands of pages of contracts or if you could go through many pages of case law looking for a specific word or phrase. Powered by NLP, computers can read and analyze thousands of written language pages in milliseconds.
NLP is behind many of the apps and online services that we use today, for example:
- Natural language processing chatbots.
- Search engines.
- Virtual assistants (Siri, Google Assistant, Lyra).
- Language translations.
- Automated transcriptions from audio to text.
- Apps for finding and correcting grammatical errors.
- Email spam filters, which in turn help prevent phishing scams.
- Extraction and summarization of information.
How NLP Can Improve Legal Search Infographic
So how does natural language processing differ from traditional search? The following Infographic explains it.
Boost Your Research with NLP Legal Tech
With this Infographic, we showed how NLP Legal Tech could improve your legal professional work life. These include: Doing legal searches using plain English, scour through court decisions and case law in seconds, reveal specific phrases that appear in lengthy documents and more.
What are your thoughts on NLP Legal Tech? Have you considered using it in your organization or law firm? Please leave a comment below.