Providing open access to caselaw (and constitutions, statutes, and periodicals, and ...) is wonderful, but there's a lot of room left in the realm of legal-oriented computing and software. The big boys (Westlaw and LexisNexis) and the other guys (FastCase, Bloomberg, etc.) provide a lot more than case text and search capability. Signals/Shepardization provides a quick way to understand treatment and subsequent history. Headnotes provide expert analysis and highlights for a given document.
Other functionality includes citation formatting, which as this article briefly touches on, can be devilishly complex. The ability to generate a formatted pin cite to a case (or other document) in Bluebook or another format, could be a huge time saver.
Non-US legal systems are a whole other can of worms and a huge opportunity.
These are just a few quick points; again, there's a huge amount of room to innovate in legal-oriented software.
I've wondered in the past how good some expert system like Watson would do with legal databases. There's a lot of speculation on how automation is going to reduce factory jobs, but very little discussion about Watson could maybe wipe out much of human-time needed for legal research. Has the hurdle mostly been that the data is locked up in difficult to access databases?
There isn't a ton of human time needed for legal research as it is. The time is in the fact finding, analysis, and arguments, not finding the law.
I'm a junior associate in a law firm, which means the legal research falls squarely on my shoulders (partners don't do legal research). And even then it's not a huge part of my job. Probably less than 10%.
Better index searching could be of help, but it'll be hard to actually make it better. Legal research databases are a huge industry and they spend a ton on improving search capabilities, but it is hard.
I think the search capability will be evolutionary not really revolutionary. But maybe I'm underestimating Watson.
I imagine the hurdle is simply the will to undertake the work. As the article notes, there are and have been various sources for caselaw. Parsing is of course painful, though XML is now available.
Other functionality includes citation formatting, which as this article briefly touches on, can be devilishly complex. The ability to generate a formatted pin cite to a case (or other document) in Bluebook or another format, could be a huge time saver.
Non-US legal systems are a whole other can of worms and a huge opportunity.
These are just a few quick points; again, there's a huge amount of room to innovate in legal-oriented software.