Whether building an argument for a case or investigating applicable regulatory statues for a client, legal's need for robust research capabilities has often driven technology adoption. And with the increasing application of artificial intelligence (AI), such research capabilities have been expanded to new heights of accuracy and specificity.

Now, the demand for legal technology providers is to help attorneys access all pertinent information as quickly and seamlessly as possible. Bloomberg Law recently sought to meet these expectations with the addition of its new subscription tool Bloomberg Points of Law. The tool leverages AI to give attorneys easier access to case law research, and allow them to understand it on a larger scale. Here's a look at the platform:

What it is: Bloomberg Points of Law is a case research platform that uses AI and data visualization to help attorneys, legal researchers and litigators highlight pertinent legal language, such as new case law or interpretations of a statute, within federal and state court opinions. It also allows users to find such legal language, which it deems “points of law,” across all court opinions in its database.

Darby Green, commercial product director for Litigation Solutions at Bloomberg BNA, explained that when scanning court opinions, the platform is trained to ignore things like its “background information and the facts,” while bringing “to the forefront those sentences and phrases that include things like 'black letter law', or elements of a particular case of action, or tests for providing a certain level of guilt or innocence, those types of facets.”

How it works: Users can search for points of law through a keyword search or through the platform's citation map, which Scott Mozarsky, president of Bloomberg Law, explained was a visual chronological representation of all cases that contain a selected point of law.

“You can see this visualization effectively as a timeline,” he said, noting that the aim of this visualization was to enable attorneys to “find cases that they wouldn't have normally found before.”

In addition to this citation map, the platform also offers raw data on each point of law's prominence within its court opinion database.

When a user highlights a point of law within a court opinion or a keyword search, for example, the platform will show certain statistical information about that highlighted language, including the number of other cases it appears in, the jurisdiction and location of courts where those cases were filed, and the case that most cited the language.

Under the Hood: Mozarsky explained that Bloomberg Points of Law connects with Bloomberg's proprietary database of “13 million published and unpublished state and federal opinions, which grows everyday by a few thousand decisions.”

Leveraging machine learning, the platform was trained by Bloomberg to identify pertinent points of law within these court opinions. The whole training process, Green noted, was no small feat. “This has been a four year endeavor, with a team of data scientists, and a team of data engineers.”

Today, however, the platform has found about “a million points of law” within the database, Mozarsky said, adding that he expects that number to grow as the platform becomes better at recognizing pertinent language within opinions.

Competition: Bloomberg's Ponts of Law joins an already crowded marketplace of similar legal research platforms.

Casetext, for example, uses machine learning to analyze briefs and other legal documents to find relevant material that covers the same legal precedents or language. Likewise, platforms like ROSS Intelligence and LexisNexis rely on IBM's AI-engine Watson to provide similar relevancy searches and capabilities within their own proprietary research platforms.

Suffice to say, employing AI in legal research is nothing new. So how does Bloomberg believe its new entry stands out?

For Mozarsky, it's all about the big picture. He noted that while the legal research space is crowded, “the reality is that what Bloomberg offers is very different than what some of these niche players offer.”

Bloomberg Points of Law, he explained, is but one part of the Bloomberg Law solution, which includes legal research, business development, and litigation analytics capabilities, among others.

Mozarsky said that Bloomberg is responding to a market demand with Bloomberg Points of Law, “but were are providing so much more above that.” With the addition of this new platform to Bloomberg Law, “it's a complete solution and that's why we feel so confident.”