The best way to understand what computer science and artificial intelligence can and cannot do in the legal domain is to learn how to program yourself. Acquiring these skills allows you to harness the power of data and analytics, transforming the way you approach legal challenges.
This course does not require any prior programming skills. It will start from scratch and introduce you to the programming language R, a widely-used tool in data science and analytics. With a beginner-friendly approach, you’ll become familiar with R’s syntax and basic concepts.
We will go through lectures, scripts, and exercises together, covering a range of legal data science applications in eight comprehensive lessons:
Lesson 1 – Getting Started: Familiarize yourself with the programming language R and set up your coding environment.
Lesson 2 – Web Scraping and Data Upload: Learn to collect data from online sources through web scraping and upload various data formats into R for analysis.
Lesson 3 – Regular Expressions: Master the art of pattern matching to search and analyze legal texts efficiently using regular expressions.
Lesson 4 – Citation Networks: Understand the connections between legal cases and documents by examining citation patterns and networks.
Lesson 5 – Dictionary Analysis: Discover how to analyze legal texts using pre-defined dictionaries to extract valuable insights from documents.
Lesson 6 – Similarity Measures: Understand and apply similarity measures to compare legal texts, identifying commonalities and differences across documents.
Lesson 7 – Automated Content Analysis Through Machine Learning: Utilize machine learning techniques to classify legal documents and analyze their content automatically.
Lesson 8 – Prediction: Harness the power of machine learning algorithms to predict legal outcomes based on historical data, enhancing your decision-making process.
By engaging with these lessons, you’ll acquire a wide range of skills, enabling you to tackle various legal data science challenges and enhance your legal practice.
The goal of this course is not to turn you into a programmer. Instead, it aims to equip you with the knowledge and tools necessary to approach and solve big legal questions in a simple programming environment. By the end of the course, you’ll have a strong foundation in legal data science, empowering you to make more informed decisions and enhance your legal practice.
For each lesson, there will be recommended readings and learning resources. Below are some general contributions that provide an insightful overview of what legal data science can achieve.