ICLR&D – Legal research and development
ICLR&D is a legal information research and development lab based in London at the Incorporated Council of Law Reporting for England and Wales, publisher of the authorised law reports of judgments decided in England and Wales.
The Lab is a dedicated environment for exploring and improving the entire primary law ecosystem, with a particular focus on case law. It fuses design, data science, legal scholarship and agile development principles in an open and collaborative setting.
The idea is to couple ICLR’s considerable archive of case law data and its traditional expertise in understanding how the common law works with a multi-disciplinary approach that draws in legal scholarship, design and technology from within and outside ICLR. Its work and findings will be made available on an open source basis, including via GitHub.
The lab’s work is concentrated on four Projects: significant, long-term research and development campaigns that focus on discrete problem spaces.
- Blackstone – a spaCy model and library for processing long-form, unstructured legal text.
- Friction – which aims to provide an authoritative account of the way judgment dissemination current works in the United Kingdom and the ways in which it could be improved.
- Raconteur – which focuses on exploring ways to accurately impart the significance and meaning of legal materials to lay users through better legal design.
- Endless Blue – a conceptual project focused on analysing and charting the English legal system as a relational system of information, transactions and changing state.
You can read more about the projects on the ICLR&D website.
