Artificial intelligence (AI) and law is an AI research area that has a history spanning more than 50 years. In the early stages, several legal-expert systems were developed. Legal-expert systems are tools designed to realize fair judgments in court. In addition to this research, as information and communication technologies and AI technologies have progressed, AI and law has broadened its view from legal-expert systems to legal analytics and, recently, a lot of machine-learning and text-processing techniques have been employed to analyze legal information. The research trends are the same in Japan as well and not only people involved with legal-expert systems, but also those involved with natural language processing as well as lawyers have become interested in AI and law. This report introduces the history of and the research activities on applying AI to the legal domain in Japan.
