Lexplorer: Navigating the Complexity of Legal Document Landscapes
Abstract
As technological and social innovations create novel regulatory challenges, legal systems grow in complexity - increasing the need for interfaces that enable effective interactions with legal document collections. Through interviews with legal scholars (n=15), we find that supporting legal work requires going beyond retrieval-centered legal-information-system paradigms. Hence, we propose Lexplorer, a flexible interface for exploring, navigating, and analyzing legal documents, based on a taxonomy capturing user intents. Distinguishing text and data views for one, few, and many documents, Lexplorer enables context-sensitive interactions with evolving collections of interconnected legal texts, facilitating Adaptive Meaning Construction in law. We evaluate Lexplorer with legal scholars (n=20) in the context of European Union law, validating our elicited requirements, intent taxonomy, and prototype design. Resulting from a close collaboration between visual-analytics researchers and legal scholars, our work also provides nuanced insights into the process required to design interactive systems for expert domains driven by implicit methodological knowledge.
