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AGENT TECHNOLOGIES
LawBot:
A Multiagent Assistant for Legal Research
SANDIP DEBNATH AND SANDIP SEN
University of Tulsa BRENT BLACKSTOCK MoreLaw
LawBot is a system of Internet-based agents that help to collect and organize the statutes and case histories relevant to a legal search. The system includes an ontology that maps colloquial terms to corresponding legal terminology, thus simplifying the systems use by people outside the legal profession.
Intelligent agents are being deployed in diverse application domains. Both desktop- and Internet-based personal assistant agents have been developed to help users with information processing tasks.1 Shopbots
are a common example. We are developing an Internet-based agent, called LawBot, to assist legal researchers in finding electronic documents that are warehoused in various databases maintained by local, state, and federal governments. LawBot is implemented as a collection of agents that are employed according to user preferences to collect, filter, organize, and recommend case histories and laws relevant to a particular search. Our goal is to create a system that can be effectively used not only by lawyers and other legal professionals but also by the layperson.
In this article, we briefly introduce the requirements of legal research and the effects of electronic documentation on it. We then describe the system architecture and legal ontology that constitute the prototype implementation of LawBot. We conclude with a discussion of current system limitations and plans for further development.
LEGAL RESEARCH
Legal information consists of two classes of documents:
Laws are abstract statements of the rights, privileges, duties, permissions, and prohibitions that apply to persons within a nation or state.
Opinions are the applications of one or more laws to a specific pattern of facts.
In the United States and many other nations, laws have a three-tiered hierarchical structure. At the top of the structure is a constitution, which is a metarule stating how subsidiary laws are made, interpreted, and enforced. Typically, subsidiary laws, or statutes, are enacted by a legislative body pursuant to the method stated in the constitution. Statutes are abstract statements of either permitted or prohibited conduct applicable to classes of facts and circumstances. Statutes are then applied to facts by courts in the judicial system. The logic and analysis employed by the court may be recorded in the...