Can legal informatics help change the way we think about the law as a system of power and control?

Legal informatics could be said then, to encompass several conceptual areas:

Advances in technology and legal informatics have led to new models for the delivery of legal services.

The study of such questions thus applies legal informatics to analyzing the relationship between technology and corporate governance structures.

Legal information retrieval is a part of the growing field of legal informatics.

First, the restriction to scientific information is removed, as in business informatics or legal informatics.

The analysis of this question concentrates on the development of privacy protection, freedom of information, legal informatics and IT-law.

One of the best definitions of legal informatics comes from Erdelez and O'Hare (1997):

There exists substantial overlap with disciplines such as psephology and, as far as the text of successfully enacted legislation is concerned, legal informatics in general.

"Legal informatics: application of information technology in law", Annual Review of Information Science and Technology, 32: 367-402.

Other advances, including XML coding in transaction contracts, and increasingly advanced document preparation systems demonstrate the importance of legal informatics in the transactional law space.

The working party enabled specialised research into the fields of legal informatics and legal aspects of computing and was also very successful in supporting a network of lawyers within these fields.

IRI not only focuses on legal issues of technology and the Internet (legal aspects of computing), but also on the development of technical solutions within the legal field (legal informatics).

Law and policy issues in legal informatics stem from the use of informational technologies in the implementation of law, such as the use of subpoenas for information found in email, search queries, and social networks.

Treating legal informatics as a field as a serious tool for changing the way people interact with the law may pave the way for radical innovations in areas of law that are seen as inherently static, top-down, and bureaucratic.

Legal informatics therefore, pertains to the application of informatics within the context of the legal environment and as such involves law-related organizations (e.g., law offices, courts, and law schools) and users of information and information technologies within these organizations.