The Impact of Artificial Intelligence on the Law

For the first time, lawyers can apply legal analytics to cases heard in New York County Supreme Court ("New York County"). Lex Machina, a subsidiary of RELX, the British information corporate formerly known as Reed Elsevier, is announcing today the publication of data on 119,000 cases. The data is based on both dockets (analogous to the abstracts of academic papers) and documents (the full papers). Numerically, this caseload is not a massive expansion to the 4.5m cases already in Lex Machina's database, but Karl Harris, Lex Machina's CEO, argues it is an important milestone because New York County is such a significant jurisdiction. Lawyers are not renowned for an addiction to statistics and maths.