A best practice for the analysis of legal documents

Abstract

Organisations deal with a large set of source documents, often concerning law and regulation, that they need to comply to or bring to execution. In the past, a team of legal specialists analysed these documents and wrote new documents containing informal preliminary specifications which are hard to validate. Another group of experts translates these documents to specifications for IT-systems. The Best Practice as described in this paper, takes another approach. In a multidisciplinary team of experts, combining the knowledge of legal specialists with the modelling competences of knowledge modelers. It describes how legal experts will analyse legal documents, add interpretations and classifications (model elements) and how knowledge modelers assist in creating extended conceptual information models. The result is a validated and extended conceptual information model, in which all knowledge elements are traceable to the original legal text. This happens with fewer translation steps compared to the approach mentioned above.