Supporting newly‐appointed judges: a legal knowledge management case study

Abstract

Purpose-In this paper we describe the process of developing and implementing a knowledge management system for the Spanish judicial domain. Spanish judges, especially newly-recruited ones, hold a solid background of theoretical legal knowledge, but are much less familiar with the judicial knowledge of the more senior judges acquired from everyday practice and case resolution. The aim of this development is to capture and model these two aspects of judicial knowledge-theoretical and practical-for knowledge browsing and retrieving. Design/methodology/approach-Semantic web technologies are applied to feed a question-answering system based on ontologies of professional legal knowledge (OPLK). Findings-There is a kind of specific legal knowledge, which belongs properly to the expert domain, not being captured by current legal core ontologies, i.e. Judges require clues, hints or well-grounded practical guidelines that refer to the problem they have before them when they put a question or start the query. A scalable and useful frequently-asked questions system should have a simple, natural language interface, work in a real time environment, and the questions included in the system should be of high quality and reflect the current situation. Originality/value-The final system will enable the users to ask queries in natural language and obtain answers, which are supported by legal documents stored in specialized legal databases. Special care is taken regarding usability issues, in order to ensure the highest user satisfaction.

Reducing Unwarranted Disparities: The Challenge of Managing Knowledge Sharing between Judges

“…In more recent years, the popular management term also received some scholarly attention in the judicial context. Here, the focus lies primarily on technology-supported information systems that are designed to support judges in their search for more detailed information and expert knowledge from others (Apistola, 2010;Casanovas et al, 2005;Wang, Noe, & Wang, 2014). Less attention has been given to the related process of knowledge sharing between judges.…”

OPJK and DILIGENT: ontology modeling in a distributed environment

“…See Winkels et al (2002), Breuker et al (2005). 3 For what it follows and a more extended explanation of the features of PLK and the properties of OPJK, see Casanovas et al (2005b). 4 Due to the use of Spanish (a romanesque language) and not English, knowledge discovery on the corpus of questions had to be improved by adding up a lemmatization step before running both applications, TextToOnto and ALCESTE.…”

An OWL ontology library representing judicial interpretations

“…The methods applied for the construction of the core legal ontology are similar to those used for [12], an online repository of legal knowledge to provide answers to issues related to legal procedures. The main difference between the two approaches is that the latter relies on application of NLP techniques to user-generated questions in order to return the correct answer.…”

“…The judicial ontology, instead, extracts information from official legal documents (laws, decisions, legal doctrine), whose content classification requires the intervention of a legal expert. Furthermore, the ontology in [12] focuses on legal procedure, while the present ontology concerns mainly the legal operations carried out by the judge in a decision, mainly judicial interpretations seen as subsumption of material facts or circumstances under abstract legal categories.…”