An Australian perspective on research and development required for the construction of applied legal decision support systems

At the Donald Berman Laboratory for Information Technology and Law, La Trobe University Australia, we have been building legal decision support systems for a dozen years. Whilst most of our energy has been devoted to conducting research in Artificial Intelligence and Law, over the past few years we have increasingly focused upon building legal decision support systems that have a commercial focus. In this paper we discuss the evolution of our systems. We begin with a discussion of rule-based systems and discuss the transition to hybrid rule-based/case-based systems. We next discuss how we have used machine learning in building legal decision support systems. Our focus on using machine learning led us to investigate the domains of explanation and argumentation. We conclude by discussing our current work on building negotiation support systems and tools for constructing web-based legal decision support systems.