Just saw an article today on an interesting feature in LawBase’s latest release of their legal focused software suite. According to John Waters, the company’s LawBase-Google Maps mashup lets “LawBase tap into Google Maps functionality to display its data visually in a geographic context, revealing potentially important patterns that might not be readily discernible in other formats.”
The article pitches some of the ways this feature might be beneficial to the legal industry as:
- Utility and insurance companies using it to track claims resulting from natural disasters or contamination.
- Government agencies using it to better detect fraud.
- Prosecutors using it as an investigative aid.
- Corporate legal departments using it to track (as an example) expiring leases as they plan facilities consolidations.
I don’t know. Granted, mashups are in their infancy at this stage, and we really haven’t seen many commercial uses for mashups, at least from a business to business perspective, but I can’t really see a need for geographically contextualised data within the legal services arena. On the other hand, no one could have imagined e-conveyancing, blog-based court procedures, or the myriad other conveniences that the internet has brought about in the legal arena, so even if this tool isn’t embraced, I have no doubt that there will be mashups introduced (that don’t perhaps attempt to integrate geographical and legal data) that have an effect on the way law is practiced.
