Courts play a critical role in resolving disputes, interpreting the law, protecting rights, and determining punishments. However, they are often not equipped to capture, analyze, or process the vast amounts of data embedded in legal documents. As a result, valuable insights remain hidden within millions of pages of complex, often inaccessible text—making it difficult for the general public and even legal experts to fully access or understand this information.
Charlotte Alexander, professor of Law and Ethics at Scheller and director of the Law, Data, and Design Lab at the Georgia Tech Scheller College of Business, is working with Betsy DiSalvo and Wei Xu from the Georgia Tech School of Interactive Computing to build AI tools to extract crucial information and generate summaries of public court documents in plain, easy-to-understand language. This will contribute to creating more open and accessible court data systems in the U.S. and globally. Their work was recently awarded a grant through Google's Academic Research Award Program focused on Society-Centered AI.
"I'm thrilled to receive support from Google for this project, along with my colleagues Wei and Betsy. There are lots of jokes about lawyers using legalese and being too wordy. All of those words contain crucial information about how our legal system operates and where it breaks down. We're excited to use AI to unlock those insights and open up court data," said Alexander.
