Somewhere between sonnets and Beat literature lies the notion of the semi-structured document, in which some type of, if not formalized, than perhaps anticipated, or at least understandable, textual layout, sectioning, and various forms of visual and labeled elements assist the reader in deciphering the document’s meaning. In fact, had the publisher been able to accommodate it, Faulkner had hoped to publish his masterpiece, The Sound and the Fury, in various colored text, each color denoting a different period of time, in order to assist the reader in making sense of what might otherwise be viewed as incoherent ramblings coming through his severely mentally disabled character’s narrative.2 And such is the current fate and ongoing dilemma facing a legal system that has historically been centered on the static, written document, collecting dust if lucky enough to be on a shelf, rather than buried in a random box under a desk in a remote office, yet all the while holding forth the rules and consequences of not abiding its every word and punctuation mark, scribbler’s errors included. This is the glue that holds society together.

The storage, description, collection, organization, and selection of legal information is central to a legal system, whether public or private, professional or lay person, structured or unstructured, textual or non-textual. The ability to get timely information where it is needed is as important to law as it is to any other field, given that law is a system of written rules and procedures. Ignorantia juris non excusat – ignorance of the law is no excuse. But where citizens seek to know the law and cannot find it, they have a right to question its legitimacy, at least as applied to them. The function of the reference librarian within a brick and mortar library, while still invaluable, does not scale to the magnitude of the problem. Technological information intermediation, such as a search engine, can thus be increasingly viewed as a necessary component of a modern legal system, and familiarity with the basic concepts is an important tool in the legal technologist’s toolkit.

The philosophy of law is the study of the nature of law: What is law? What are the criteria of a functioning legal system? What is the relationship between law and morality? A course on legal technology and legal informatics focuses on the technological implementation of a legal system. As we move away from static, printed documents toward virtual, distributed, integrated systems, software (“code”) plays an increasingly important role in the legal system. Obviously code has applications far beyond implementing law. Yet, as Lawrence Lessig points out in Code 2.0, non-law code also regulates behavior, often in a more fundamental way than laws do.1 As discussed in this chapter, code is architectural in nature and effectively limits behavior similarly to laws of physics. Only in science fiction do we entertain the notion of faster-than-light travel, perpetual motion, or evading gravitational forces. Similarly, we tend to accept the limitations of code that prevent us from, say, lending out our e-books, though such lending would certainly be legal. Even if we are aware of these limits and do not like them, most of us have no capacity to change them. As far as our behavior is concerned, code may as well be the law.2

Big Law has been described as being in the throes of a painful transformation brought about by factors such as globalization, the increased use of technology, and a transition from a supply-driven market to a demand-driven one. A common framework for such upheaval is Clayton Christensen’s The Innovator’s Dilemma, which generally portends an inevitable collapse of market incumbents when they cater to the performance requirements of their high-value customers’ demands. Big Law is not immune to the principles of The Innovator’s Dilemma. However, neither the disruptive nor sustaining innovation described in Christensen’s work seem to adequately characterize the changes occurring. In this chapter, we describe a hybrid model, adaptive innovation, that takes into account the opposing forces in play. As with most other sectors, lawyers have argued that Big Law is different. This chapter reviews some of the most cited factors predicting and denying the demise of Big Law. We argue that market-imposed values such as quality, efficiency, and ROI will likely dominate over reputation and comprehensiveness, forcing a fundamental change in many common features of Big Law. However, law firms will likely remain an inevitable mechanism for the delivery of services, albeit under a different model.

From document review in litigation, to compliance, case prediction, billing, negotiation and settlement, contracting, patent management, due diligence, legal research, and beyond, technology is transforming the production of legal work and in turn the economics of the legal industry. Legal informatics is the academic discipline that underlies many of these transformational technologies, and despite all of these technical advances, no modern comprehensive treatment of the field has been offered to date. With contributions from more than two dozen academic and industry experts, this book offers readers a first-of-its-kind introductory overview of the exciting field of legal informatics.