Robert Pickel

Big enough: understanding and complying with law through computational analysis of legal data

A 2011 report by McKinsey Global Institute predicted that “big data” would grow in importance, “underpinning new waves of productivity growth”. Now, nearly ten years later, that prediction has come true. The focus of this Spotlight article is not big data, but data sets in the legal world, which share some of the characteristics of big data. The different nature of these data sets creates opportunities for targeted applications that allow the data – the law – to be analysed and rendered useful in making critical legal and compliance decisions. Legal data, though not big data, is nevertheless big enough to support the development of these analytical tools.