The best way to understand what computer science and artificial intelligence can and cannot do in the legal domain is to learn how to program yourself. This course does not require any prior programming skills. It will start from scratch and introduce you to the programming language R. We will go through lectures, scripts and exercises together that will deal with different legal data science applications. This includes legal search using regular expressions, text to data conversions and analyses, citation network analysis, and legal classification and prediction through machine learning. The goal is not to turn you into a programmer. Instead, it will help you learn how to approach and solve big legal questions in a simple programming environment.
For each lesson, there will be recommended readings and learning resources. Below are some general contributions, that provide an overview of legal data science is capable of.