A legal knowledge based system called JUSTICE is presented which can identify heterogeneous representations of concepts across all major Australian jurisdictions, and some concepts within US and UK cases. The knowledge representation scheme used for legal and common sense concepts is inspired by human processes for the identification of concepts and the expected order and location of concepts. These are supported by flexible search functions and various string utilities. JUSTICE is a client-based legal software agent which works with both plaintext and HTML representations of legal cases over file systems, and the World Wide Web. In creating JUSTICE an ontology for legal cases was developed, and this is implicit within JUSTICE.

So far, the experiments with word sense disambiguation techniques have been disappointing. Voorhees (1993) uses the word senses in the lexicon WorldNet for disambiguation. The improvement of the retrieval is modest. The sense disambiguation is very difficult in short query statements. Missing correct matches because of incorrect sense resolution have a deleterious effect on retrieval performance.