Amii Fellow Randy Goebel has had a profound impact on the field of legal reasoning. In addition to co-founding the Competition on Legal Information Extraction/Entailment (COLIEE) -- a competition which has built a community of practice regarding legal information processing and textual entailment -- Randy also led a team that designed a competition-winning legal reasoning system that’s on the road toward beating the Japanese bar exam.

Randy’s latest contribution to the field is to be named advisor to the freshly launched Legal Innovation Data Institute (LIDI), where he is listed as a LIDI Advisor. The University of Alberta’s xAI Lab (of which Randy is a Principal Investigator) is also listed as a Research and Development Partner.

As reported by Artificial Lawyer in their recent article LIDI Project To Lower Legal Data Barriers, Help NLP Training, this new project aims to increase access to legal data. From the article:

“LIDI will operate as ‘a steward of public, but sensitive court and tribunal rulings and other legal data’. In short it will make it easier for lawyers and other interested parties, including tech companies that perhaps need legal data for NLP machine learning training, to access and make use of a broad collection of legal information.”

According to the article, the legal data trust includes the Compass collection (the source of the Canadian case law in the vLex legal databases), nearly all judgments published by 43 Canadian courts, nearly 200,000 case law headnotes and over 580,000 topic digests ordered according to a 150 topic Key Number System.

With this data, LIDI will work in the following areas: protection of personal privacy, data clean-up, normalization and enrichment; development of free public legal apps; and advancing French language access to justice.

“It is simply an essential step to create an entity whose sole purpose is the gathering, curation, and distribution of legal information in all forms,” says Randy Goebel. “Without this foundation, the development of digital infrastructure for all legal information processing will be less effective, less robust, and less trusted.”

Read the full article on the Artificial Lawyer website.