Analysing Legal Information Requirements for Public Policy Making

Résumé En

Most of the research that has been conducted in the area of legal informatics concerns its ‘supply side’, dealing with the development of effective systems for legal information provision. However, limited research has been conducted on the ‘demand side’ of legal information provision, though it is absolutely necessary to gain a good understanding of it, in order to design effective and useful systems for the provision of legal information; furthermore, this limited research is dealing with the legal information needs of the lawyers, and neglects the ones of other important groups. This paper contributes to filling this research gap. It analyses legal information requirements of a highly important for the society group: the designers of public policies. Initially we investigate current legal information sources and systems used by public policy makers, as well as their relevant search practices. Then we investigate their business needs for additional capabilities/functionalities for a better support of their policymaking activities using advanced legal analytics tools and services. Finally, we discuss the information, processing and technical requirements for the development of a legal information system providing the above advanced functionalities and services. For the above purposes, we have collected data through semi-structured interviews form 13 Greek and 7 Austrian public administrators dealing with the design of public policies, which lead to interesting and useful insights, as well as a novel set of additional advanced capabilities and functionalities that can give rise to a new generation of legal informatics.