Legal informatics

Legal informatics studies and applies information technology and information science to legal practice, institutions, and research. It includes systems for organizing legal knowledge, automating tasks, and supporting legal decisions.

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Legal research: The process of finding and analyzing legal authorities to answer legal questions. Digital databases make statutes, cases, and commentary searchable across jurisdictions.
Legal knowledge representation: Methods for encoding legal concepts, rules, relations, and exceptions in forms computers can process. It provides formal structures for making legal information computationally usable.
Legal information: Information about laws, legal authorities, proceedings, rights, and legal institutions. It is the subject matter that informatics systems organize and process.
Legal technology: Tools and services that use technology to support or deliver legal work. The term often names products and practice changes, while informatics also studies information structures and methods.
Electronic discovery: The identification, collection, processing, review, and production of electronically stored information for litigation. It applies information systems to evidence gathered in disputes.
Legal ontology: A formal specification of concepts and relationships within a legal domain. Ontologies help systems align legal terms across documents and databases.
Metadata: Structured data that describes other data, such as its source, date, author, or subject. Metadata makes legal materials easier to identify, sort, and connect.
Computational law: The design of laws and legal processes so computers can apply or execute them. It is a more focused effort to make legal rules computationally operational.
Legal document automation: Software-assisted creation of legal documents from structured data, templates, and decision rules. It turns repeatable legal drafting into a computable workflow.
Natural language processing: Computational methods for analyzing, interpreting, and generating human language. Legal systems use it to search, classify, extract, and summarize text.