One of the key skills for legal professionals in common law legal systems, such as in the U.K. and U.S., is the identification, analysis and use of previously decided cases to advocate a client’s cause. To identify the appropriate cases, one must search the body of case law, or case corpora, for those cases that are relevant to the case at hand and, from those, select the ones with high precedential value. In this article, we discuss available bodies of case law, how electronic searches are currently conducted, their result sets, and the opportunities to apply natural language processing tools to deliver richer, more accurate and more analytic results faster and more cost-effectively.
CASE CORPORA
