Decision Support for Legal Reasoning

Our courts make extremely complex decisions that affect us all.  While the rules for making those decisions are public and well-documented, it is often difficult even for legal experts to extract those rules in a usable form from the tremendous volume of legal documents.  And the rules can change on a daily basis.  Moreover, the evidence needed to apply the rules to particular cases can be extensive and complex.  It is clear, therefore, why many lawyers specialize in a particular area of law, which limits the knowledge that they must acquire, maintain, and apply.

Law schools face the challenge of teaching this increasingly complex body of knowledge. Law students read case after case, trying to acquire legal information and to figure out the structure of legal reasoning itself.  They must learn to “think like lawyers” by studying what lawyers and judges before them have said in documented cases.  But given the complexity of the task, it is not surprising that some students are far more successful than others at learning the law well in school. Nor is it surprising that the gap is widening between what law students are able to learn in three years and what law offices expect graduating students to know.

Legal Apprentice

The Legal Apprentice can help both practicing lawyers and law students. It adapts the tools from the Apprentice Decision Modeler to capture both legal information and legal reasoning.  The Legal Apprentice helps legal experts capture the rules, evidence, and reasoning from reported cases. And it helps lawyers and students use that captured knowledge to analyze arguments and evidence in the next case.

The legal expert in a particular area of law can use the Legal Apprentice to model, maintain, and publish the legal rules in that area, as well as the reasoning employed in reported cases.  Publishing those rules and cases within a Legal Apprentice framework makes them available for immediate use by others.  Practicing lawyers using the Legal Apprentice can apply the published rules and cases to new cases under litigation, analyzing new evidence and new arguments.  Law students can study the reasoning in those published rules and cases, and can develop analogous reasoning for hypothetical cases.

The Legal Apprentice can also generate reports, in PDF format, that contain the current status of the rules, evidence, and arguments under consideration.

The Legal Apprentice Student Edition

To assist with the peculiar challenge facing law students, Apprentice Systems will launch a Student Edition of the Legal Apprentice that will be available for free download to qualified students.  This download will be available on a new website for law students that will be launched in early 2006.

If you would like to be notified when the new website is launched, contact us...