I'm curious if there is a startup opportunity here to bring defense law to the masses. There is legal zoom for paperwork type issues, but could better knowledge of the law in the hands of a common man be a way to go?
There have been various attempts to apply software to law, none of which were very convincing.
The biggest impact has been on legal discovery. Often the evidence one side or another needs is buried in massive quantities of documents, e.g. corporate memos. It used to involve people manually going through every document. Now computers can build a search engine just for that case, based on the documents either being originally electronic, or scanned. So it's easier to find the evidence you need to either prosecute or exonerate.
There have been attempts at legal 'expert systems'. Expert systems were an offshoot of early AI where people were put through computerised interviews that tried to automate otherwise skilled investigative procedures. I have not heard of legal expert systems being in use anywhere, but I am not in the legal industry so if they were, I wouldn't know about them. I suspect they're easier to apply to things like routine property law than complex criminal cases.
There's also the Hammurabi project. That is very interesting, though again, not relevant here. It tries to encode law in a custom programming language to automatically build expert systems based on it. It's more useful for things like navigating the absurdly complicated US tax code than criminal defence (of course the two may sometimes overlap).
