UCLA

Antiquated technology plagues the legal industry. While the legal market generates billions of dollars of revenue annually, the technology that supports it is decentralized, inconsistent and outdated. With the purpose of promoting modernization and illustrating how technology could improve existing inefficiencies in legal research, this thesis evaluates the creation and execution of an automated lawsuit classification system called the Civil Lawsuit Analysis System ("CLAS"). CLAS classifies the nature of a lawsuit based on information contained in a subset of attorney-authored court documents called "Memorandum of Points and Authorities" that are filed with trial courts during the process of the lawsuit. In light of the fact that no similar automated classification system exists today, developing the process by which CLAS operates proved to be a collaborative and time-intensive process that ultimately required specialized knowledge in both the computer science and the legal fields.