LEGAL DOCUMENT TOOLKIT DEVELOPMENT

Award outcome

Description

The National Archives has developed a variety of different tools for working with legal information through our work delivering the legislation.gov.uk, Lawmaker and Find Case Law services. The umbrella term for these tools is the 'Legal Document Toolkit'. There are specific tools which can securely receive, represent, store, transform, query, analyse, enrich, revise and publish legal documents of different types. The Toolkit has powerful drafting tools, both the new browser-based Lawmaker and an older but sophisticated Word-based template. The toolkit also has a variety of data transformation and enrichment tools. These enable us to take legal documents in hard to work with formats and convert them into machine friendly data formats - ideal for computational analysis using AI approaches. The toolkit has analysis tools, including a domain specific query language for legislation, the first (and we think only) one of its kind. An initial assessment of the Legal Document Toolkit has been carried out to identify potential tech transfer/exploitation opportunities, to test those opportunities against potential markets, consider their value and impact, and look at potential delivery models. The initial analysis revealed a list of ten potential opportunities and worked to validate and prioritise these based on how easy they would be to develop, the potential market value and impact, and how closely they might align with The National Archives wider strategies. The top-ranking ideas were then further developed to flesh out what might be required to produce something market ready. This initial work has identified a range of opportunities of varying type that could be taken forward however, it has also made clear that a considerable amount of work needs to be done to realise the benefits. Ideas need to be further developed, detailed market analysis and trials carried out, business models explored and identified, and investment options scoped and tested.   Although the initial focus will be on the top-prioritised opportunities, we will want to test ones further down the list over time as well as any new ones that emerge either as a direct result of this work or by further innovation from within The National Archives. This process will take a number of years and will be sporadic, as funding for each separate opportunity will have to be secured based on the details of each instance. We hope to identify a consultancy partner that will be able to work alongside our in-house teams and provide expertise and guidance around exploitation opportunities in this sector. They will help develop propositions, test these within the appropriate markets, identify potential delivery partners and advise on appropriate business models. Expertise of building investable business propositions is essential, especially in the public sector. Knowledge and experience of the UK legal sector would also be highly desirable. We intend to award a contract for an initial period of 3 years, with two extension options of up to 12 months each. We anticipate that the maximum expenditure over the duration of the contract period (including any extension options) will be £2m including VAT (i.e. an average maximum expenditure of £400,000 per year).

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