From RELAW Research to Practice: Reflections on an Ongoing Technology Transfer Project

Abstract

Over the past years, we have been studying the topic of automated metadata extraction from legal texts. While our research has been motivated primarily by RE problems, we have observed that the interdisciplinarity of the research on legal metadata, and indeed on several other topics considered by the RELAW community, has the potential to trigger innovation beyond the traditional RE. In particular, legal metadata is a key enabler for the rapidly-expanding field of Legal Technology (LegalTech). In this short paper, we describe the preliminary steps we have taken toward transitioning a prototype tool for legal metadata extraction (developed in our previous work) into a platform that is palatable to the LegalTech market. We hope that our findings would provide useful insights about the value chain for legal metadata and further offer a concrete example of a technology transfer attempt that is rooted in RELAW research.