A Digital Advantage and the power of Artificial Intelligence
Artificially Intelligent Law Dictionary
Printed Legal Dictionaries have been fundamentally the same size ever since their inception. Black’ s Law Dictionary is regarded by many as the definitive law dictionary and it is only about 1600 or so pages. Its been about the same size for over 120 years and they do their legal research the old fashioned way! The key question that has always bothered us and one that you must ask is, “What happened to all the law that has been formulated and created over the past centuries?”
Do the people that publish printed dictionaries simply pick and choose what law they want to present to you? What happens to the rest of the law? How about definitions for legal idiomatic concepts? Printed Legal Dictionaries just don’ t have the space to fully define all the important concepts of the law. So how can a printed dictionary really define complex idiomatic law?
Dean’s Law Dictionary is digital so we keep the old and add the new. We don’t need to make decisions as to what to keep because of limited space concerns. In fact we laid out our current dictionary to mimic a printed version and it came to 21,309 pages! The more legal research we accomplish the better and better Dean’s Law Dictionary gets. The more valuable it becomes for you the user because you will find what you need. That certainly cannot be said about a printed dictionary.
We have the digital advantage and we have combined that with advanced artificial intelligence technology to do our legal research and to create the definitions in Dean’s Law. We use a knowledge database and play a game of 20 questions. We input a specific topical area and search our case databases and find the most relevant answers by asking simple questions that produce complex results. As our knowledge database, or dictionary, grows larger and larger the relevant answers we produce get better and better. As we add more cases to our database, our results become perfect.
There is a law in relational dynamics that relates to how large a knowledge database gets over time. This is called Snell’s law but it is not the Snell’s law you may be familiar with in regards to physical optics.
The Snell’s law we are concerned with states that as a relational database encompasses more and more unique items its size and growth dramatically decrease to a point where as it approaches total knowledge, its size barely increases. Fundamentally, this is intuitive because a database of massive size just doesn’t need to expand by very much to accommodate new information.
Because of Snell’s law, and the fact that we have been doing this for some time, our knowledge data base does not have many new items to add which means that we are close to having the ability to do a thorough all encompassing analysis of most all the law that exists. All we need to do is to get more cases to feed into the programs. We already have 200,000 and we are adding more as fast as we can.
Even so, this has resulted in a product that is second to none. Dean’ s is already the most advanced and comprehensive law dictionary in the world. And we have barely scratched the surface!