The department is working with pioneering, fixed fee law firm Riverview to adapt IT advances for application within the law. Dr Katie Atkinson, reader in the agent applications, research and technology group, said: 'There’s lots of artificial intelligence that can be applied to law. One thing is case-based reasoning. Normally, a judge would have to decide whether to rule the case for the plaintiff or the defendant. But using computational argumentation it’s possible to use automated reasoning about those arguments and which are the winning ones and why. It’s only been tested it in a couple of small cases.'

Intelligent reasoning

She went on to explain: 'Artificial intelligence techniques look at links between documents and do some intelligent reasoning.' Source: Liverpool Echo