Legal Engineering: A structural approach to Improving Legal Quality

Abstract

Knowledge engineers have been working in the legal domain since the rise of their discipline in the mid-eighties of the last century. Traditionally their main focus was capturing and distributing knowledge by means of the knowledge-based systems, thus improving legal access. More and more legal knowledge engineering has become an analytical approach that helps to improve legal quality. An example is the POWER-approach developed in a research programme that is now finished. This programme was run by the Dutch Tax and Customs Administration (DTCA in Dutch: Belastingdienst) and some partners (see e.g. Van Engers et al., 1999, 2000, 2001, 2003 and 2004). The POWER-approach helped to improve quality of (new) legislation and codify the knowledge used in the translation processes in which legislation and regulations are transformed into procedures, computer programs and other designs. We experienced that despite these clear benefits implementation proved to be far from easy. In fact the implementation phase still continues. Adapting research results in public administrations is a tedious process that takes lots and lots of energy and requires continuous management attention. Learning at organisational level proved to be much harder than we thought.

Parts of the material described here have been published before (see e.g. Van Engers 2004).

Tom M. van Engers was programme manager of the POWER research programme and coordinator of the IST funded E-Power project.