Open source NLP and machine learning for legal texts. What is Blackstone and how did we build it? — ICLR&D

"On 7 August 2019, the Incorporated Council of Law Reporting’s newly formed research lab, ICLR&D, launched the prototype version of its legal natural language processing system, Blackstone.

For a more technical run down of what Blackstone is and how to use it, go over to the project’s GitHub repository here. The purpose of this article is to provide a more general account of how Blackstone came into being and the thinking driving its development....

Blackstone is an experimental project to investigate the ways in natural language processing can be used to impose control and structure on legal content generated in uncontrolled environments. The project’s deliverable is an open source piece of software, the Blackstone library, that allows researchers and engineers to automatically extract information from long, unstructured legal texts (such as judgments, skeleton arguments, scholarly articles, Law Commission reports, pleadings etc.) ..."