Robert Ambrogi Blog
Bloomberg Law today rolled out to its subscribers new tool, Points of Law, that uses artificial intelligence and machine learning to help legal researchers quickly find language critical to a court’s reasoning and to support their legal arguments.
As a researcher scrolls through a court opinion, Points of Law highlights the essential language in the opinion, making it easier for the researcher to browse through the key discussion points and enabling the researcher to more quickly get the gist of the key holdings.
A pop-up shows the top three cases cited for the principle. The user can then select any of these Points of Law to see an expanded treatment that shows other cases that make the same point of law and an visual timeline and citation map of these other cases, as well as the ability to see and search related points of law. Each Point of Law has its own distinct page with these elements.
“We are using machine learning and AI to extract the sense of a what a judge says in an opinion to allow for quicker and easier research and to uncover language that might be hard to find,” Darby Green, commercial product director for Bloomberg Law Litigation Solutions, told me yesterday.
Bloomberg says that it has extracted more than one million Points of Law from its database of 13 million published and unpublished state and federal court opinions, and that these Points of Law are being continually updated as new cases are added.
In addition to getting to these Points of Law through a court opinion, a researcher can also find them by conducting keyword searches across all case law or specific jurisdictions.
Viewing these points of law for a case has the feeling of viewing headnotes. Green was reluctant to label these as headnotes because other Bloomberg Law materials have more formal, structured headnotes. However, she agreed with the comparison and said that, later this year, users will have the ability to see these Points of Law listed at the top of a case.