1. Michael Poulshock Best Practices for Building Legal Knowledge Bases Michael Poulshock Wolfram Data Summit September 4-5, 2014

3. About me o Legal knowledge engineer o Lawyer + programmer o Work at Exeter Group o Build systems that automate law and policy

4. Automating the law? o Encoding legal rules o Applying the rules to fact patterns o Getting legal conclusions or “determinations” o Embedding this functionality in a larger system

5. Vocab o Expert systems o Business rule engines o Knowledge base o Knowledge engineering o Policy automation / modeling o Decision support systems o Calculators o Computational law

6. Examples

13. irs.gov/ita

20. Benefits of automation o Consistency o Speed o Cost-effectiveness o Auditability o Breadth of knowledge o Updated as the law changes

21. Best Practices

22. “An expert is a person who has made all the mistakes that can be made in a very narrow field.” Niels Bohr

23. 1. Declarative paradigm o Procedural (step-by-step) o Declarative (if-then) o Policy rules tend to be expressed declaratively o Procedural representations (such as flowcharts) do not scale well

24. 1. Declarative paradigm proceduraldeclarative the transaction is in compliance if the amount < $10,000 or the date > 2014-12-31 or the type = “Intracompany” compliesQ[t_] := amount[t] < 10000 || date[t] > {2014, 12, 31} || type[t] == “Intracompany”

25. 2. Isomorphism o Code should be structured similarly to the policy rules o Correspondence / traceability o Rule verification o Maintenance

26. 2. Isomorphism the waiver of inadmissability is valid under 8 CFR 1207.3(b) if the basis = “Humanitarian grounds” or the basis = “Family unity” or the basis = “Public interest”

27. 2. Isomorphism - techniques o Use domain vocabulary o Follow document structure o Include citations o Add code comments documenting assumptions, etc.

28. 3. Cross-trained developers o Programmers  lawyers o Lawyers  programmers o Center of Excellence approach o Handling changes in the law o Fundamentally, this is programming

29. Tree-like structure of legal rules the person is liable for the tax if the person’s income >= $12,000 and the person is not a tax dependent the person’s income =... the person is a tax dependent if...

30. Tree-like structure of legal rules

33. 4. Tool that can analyze the tree o Fundamental challenge: o How do you know what the inputs are for a particular goal? o How do you know which are relevant? o Need a tool that can collect data in automated way o Debugging o Dynamic interviews

34. 5. Separation of policy rules o Fundamental tension between declarative rules and interview behavior o Don’t want to hard code interview sequences o But we want a humane and empathetic user experience

35. 5. Separation of policy rules o Best practice is to separate policy logic from other types of rules, such as: o Interview sequence o Interview messages and visibility o Data transformation o Data validation

36. 6. Time Why time is complicated: 1.Laws change 2.Facts change 3.The way facts change matters 4.Points of reference change

37. 6. Time o Handling time can easily make a mess of your code o Need to address time early on o Backdrop of absolute time o Need functions and data structures for handling time

38. 7. Knowledge of ignorance o Not all law is worth automating o Granularity o Models are always approximate o Systems need to know what they don’t know and route those cases to humans

39. 8. Sufficiently expressive language o Many tools out there o Some geared to business users o Many not expressive enough o Many not extendable o Functional programming is preferable o Conservation of complexity

40. 9. General software best practices a)Functional programming b)Unit testing c)Refactoring

41. Closing thoughts o Law is inherently complex o Legal logic is fractal-esque o Law is more computational than it may first appear o Wrapper / interface around the law’s complexity o Making the law more accessible

42. Michael Poulshock mpoulshock@gmail.com www.linkedin.com/in/mpoulshock Thank you!