Legal document interface helps scholars navigate complex law collections
Lexplorer: Navigating the Complexity of Legal Document Landscapes
Human-Computer InteractionInformation Retrieval
Summary
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.
What this means in practice
- •For legal researchers: Improve exploration and analysis of complex legal document collections for deeper insight into laws and their relationships.
- •For policy analysts: Support navigating interconnected regulatory texts to assess implications of evolving policies.
Authors
Daniel Fürst, Titus Pünder, Maximilian T. Fischer, Corinna Coupette
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.