Applied legal knowledge based systems

For many years researchers have been working in the intersection between artificial intelligence and law. The first International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Law was held in 1987, but prior to this there were many individual researchers who found this a fertile and interesting field in which to examine the nature of both law and artificial intelligence techniques. The systems described show that it is possible and desirable to build useful applied systems in law. They show that they can have positive benefits in people's lives, and that the technology exists to create worthwhile systems. They also point to some general principles in designing rule-based systems in legal domains. However, they equally show that legal reasoning is harder than it looks, and that we still have significant work ahead of us if we are to build easy-to-use, applied legal knowledge based systems.