Legal informatics

Legal informatics is an area within information science. Erdelez and O’Hare (1997) define legal informatics as follows:

Advances in technology and legal informatics have led to new models for the delivery of legal services. Legal services have traditionally been a "bespoke" product created by a professional attorney on an individual basis for each client. However, to work more efficiently, parts of these services will move sequentially from (1) bespoke to (2) standardized, (3) systematized, (4) packaged, and (5) commoditized. Moving from one stage to the next will require embracing different technologies and knowledge systems.

The widespread introduction of cloud computing provides several benefits in delivering legal services. Legal service providers can use the Software as a Service model to earn a profit by charging customers a per-use or subscription fee. This model has several benefits over traditional bespoke services.

Software as a service also complicates the attorney-client relationship in a way that may have implications for attorney-client privilege. The traditional delivery model makes it easy to create delineations of when attorney-client privilege attaches and when it does not. But in more complex models of legal service delivery other actors or automated processes may moderate the relationship between a client and their attorney making it difficult to tell which communications should be legally privileged.

Because the traditional model for delivery services demanded all legal work to be done in a bespoke manner the supply of legal services is generally inelastic. Households that are ineligible for legal aid but are not able to easily afford bespoke legal services are effectively underserved by the traditional model. A report by the American Bar Association Standing Committee on the Delivery of Legal Services found that “among moderate-income households, 39% used the legal system to attempt resolution of their legal problems, 23% attempted resolution without legal help, and 26% took no action.” New organizations seek to access this under-served latent market by using technology to reduce prices and make services more available.

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