Papers for

legal researchers

Papers whose findings have a practical use for this group, as judged from the abstract. Open a paper to read what it means in practice.

Legal document interface helps scholars navigate complex law collections

Lexplorer: Navigating the Complexity of Legal Document Landscapes

Abstract: As technological and social innovations create novel regulatory challenges, legal systems grow in complexity - increasing the need for interfaces that enable effective interactions with legal document collections. Through interviews with legal scholars (n=15), we find that supporting legal work requires going beyond retrieval-centered legal-information-system paradigms. Hence, we propose Lexplorer, a flexible interface for exploring, navigating, and analyzing legal documents, based on a taxonomy capturing user intents. Distinguishing text and data views for one, few, and many documents, Lexplorer enables context-sensitive interactions with evolving collections of interconnected legal texts, facilitating Adaptive Meaning Construction in law. We evaluate Lexplorer with legal scholars (n=20) in the context of European Union law, validating our elicited requirements, intent taxonomy, and prototype design. Resulting from a close collaboration between visual-analytics researchers and legal scholars, our work also provides nuanced insights into the process required to design interactive systems for expert domains driven by implicit methodological knowledge.

Tue 15 SeptHuman-Computer InteractionInformation Retrieval
The gist
Legal documents are becoming more complex as laws change with technology and society. The authors spoke with legal experts to understand how people really use these documents and found current search tools aren’t enough. They created Lexplorer, a tool that helps scholars explore and analyze legal documents in ways that fit their goals. Their tests with law experts showed Lexplorer matches real-world needs and helps understand complex, connected legal texts better.
Open → 2609.17366v1