A major survey on the needs for court data by tech companies has been launched by the Ministry of Justice (MoJ), in order to help shape its future strategy for how Her Majesty’s Courts and Tribunals Service (HMCTS) makes accessible information generated by the thousands of disputes and claims running through the system each year.
Many legal tech companies seek to tap this data for a variety of uses. One example is the gathering of court records to train up Natural Language Processing (NLP) systems, which can then be used for everything from litigation outcome prediction, to more granular legal research.
In the UK there has been an ongoing conversation about how best to access court data in order to support legal tech companies. It still remains unclear to many in the market how to get hold of all of the UK’s court data and what their rights are in terms of using it to create commercial products. There is also the challenge that a lot of UK court data is in effect behind a pay wall because of legal publishers that collate the information.
This is therefore a positive step and shows that the MoJ and HMCTS are seeking to enable the legal tech sector and reduce barriers to data access.
So, if you have an interest in this area, check out the survey.
You can access the survey here. It takes about 10 minutes. Deadline is 1st Nov, 2019.
Some example questions are below:
Your responses will be used by the MoJ and HMCTS to inform government policy and HMCTS data strategy. At the end of the survey you will be asked whether you provide your consent for the release of your anonymised responses.
Questions or further comments: Please get in touch with Lydia.Morris@justice.gov.uk.