Use Case Scenarios on Legal Text Mining

Abstract

Europe's vision is to establish a well-functioning Digital Single Market, where Europeans are able to move and trade among the EU member states. On the other hand the large amount of information about laws that apply in each EU country has posed significant barriers in this vision. Moreover only legal experts can follow the latest legislation in each country consuming a large amount of business resources in order to follow the current legislation. However, Mass customization tools can help to filter and thereby reduce the flood of legal information and make it easier to be followed from businesses and citizens without legal expertise. The proposed solution is a novel ICT architecture utilising and built upon text mining, advanced processing and semantic analysis of legal information towards the provision of a set of services for citizens, businesses, and administrations of the European Union. In order to provide the most appealing, comprehensive and added value services in the legal domain, this paper presents six use case scenarios based on the opinion of different target groups. Conducting interviews and focus groups, we were able to identify the novel functionalities and services of great importance for the users highlighting and addressing users' daily problems regarding legal information. Generally, interviews with the different target groups reveal that at this point, users prioritise their needs towards more basic services such as search functionalities and correlation with previous laws. Lawyers on the other hand as more competent target group asked for summarisation and reporting services. All target groups where eager on the implementation of this service which as it seems it will directly impact their everyday professional and personal use of legal information.