A Knowledge-Based System to Support Legal Case Construction

Abstract

We have designed a system to support collaborative case reasoning and building in corporate litigation cases, that is, processes of bringing and pursuing lawsuits. The design is based on our understanding of the domain acquired through analysis of the literature, interviews of various parties involved in corporate litigation processes, and studies of the commercial tools already available. In this paper we illustrate the designed system and in particular the interaction modes that it supports that we believe address a number of the requirements that emerged through our analysis. We also describe its main components and their integration, including a knowledge model that represents the domain, and a natural language processing component for extracting semantic information. A description of a prototype system is also provided.