Challenge

European and national law is published across many separate databases, languages and legal systems. For lawyers, judges, researchers and businesses, finding how an EU rule has been interpreted or applied by courts in different Member States can therefore require time-consuming searches across sources that are not technically connected.

Legal documents also contain complex relationships, such as citations, amendments and references to earlier judgments, that conventional keyword searches do not always reveal. This limits access to national case law concerning EU legislation and makes cross-border legal research particularly difficult.

Solutions

EUCases developed a pan-European platform that collected millions of legal documents from EU and national portals and transformed them into structured, linked open data. Language technologies, legal ontologies and semantic analyses were used to classify documents, identify citations and connect national legislation and judgements with relevant EU law.

Two aplications demonstrated how this infrastructure could support practical legal work. ConsumerCases offered multilingual access to national consumer-protection decisions, while EULinksChecker helped professionals identify relevant legislation, judgements and semantic connections while drafting or reviewing documents. The platform processed legal material from Austria, Bulgaria, France, Germany, Italy and the United Kingdom.

Results

EUCases showed how fragmented legal information could be connected and searched across languages and jurisdictions. By combining linked open data with automated document analysis, the project made relationships between EU law and national decisions easier to discover and demosntrated new ways of reusing public legal information.

EuLinksChecker was shortlisted for the European Commission’s 2016 Innovation Radar Prize. The project also laid the technological groundwork for EuroCases, a commercial multilingual legal information service launched by consortium parter APIS that provides access to European case law concerning the application of EU law.