Architecture and Evaluation of an Advanced Legal Information Platform—Enhancing Productivity of Modern Legal Work

It is widely recognized that legislation is of critical importance for the proper functioning of economies and societies. However, the increasing complexity of the problems and challenges faced by modern economies and societies have resulted in the development of extensive, highly complex, and continuously evolving legislations. This makes it difficult for firms and administrations, as well as individual lawyers and public servants, to know the current applicable legislation on a particular topic of interest, as well as its evolution over time. This difficulty increases further due to the internationalization–globalization of economic activity, as well as the development of supranational organizations (such as the European Union (EU)), which make it necessary to continuously monitor legislations of several countries on various topics of interest. Existing national legal information platforms cannot satisfy the above highly complex requirements. This paper contributes to filling this gap, initially by describing the architecture and the capabilities/functionalities of an advanced “international” legal information platform, which has been developed as part of the European research program “ManyLaws,” based on requirements collected through interviews with lawyers and public servants; it enables the advanced search and retrieval of relevant legal documents on a particular topic of interest from within the legislative corpuses of many different countries, as well as EU legislation, using existing sources of open legal information, and also the automated comparative analysis of them and identification of various types of relations among them. The evaluation of this advanced legal information platform, using an extension of the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM), provides evidence of the usefulness and the ease of use of its novel functionalities, as well as their positive contribution to the productivity of both national-level legal work and international-level legal work, especially within the EU. The proposed advanced legal information platform can be quite useful for firms and administrations, as well as individual lawyers and public servants, active in the modern globalized economic context.