Digesto Pesquisa e Banco de Dados

Digesto started with a clear aim to use modern computer science tools to improve the practice of law. We believe the technologies that allow the processing of large amounts of text, identifying trends and machine learning, can help citizens, companies, lawyers, prosecutors and judges respond better to questions about how to interpret and apply the law in Brazil. The first problem we propose to solve is how to improve the practice of case law research. We believe, as Justice Holmes - the quote that inspires us - that the expectation of what the courts will say about a certain law, is in reality the law itself. So understanding what was said in the past is important to interpret the law. Legal research has changed in the last 15 years from the book format to a digital format, but this process left out an important component, the curator. While in ancient repositories every decision was carefully chosen, the internet has come to accept everything, making it difficult to identify what is relevant or not, but with the advantage of allowing the user to have access to everything, not only to what was selected by the editorial board. The objective of Digesto is to use technology so that each user becomes the curator of it's own repository, providing tools that facilitate research and subsequent filtering of what is important. We want to make legal research faster and more pleasurable. We want the case law research to be only the first area of Legal practice to be impacted by our technology. We hope to soon make available other great tools, based on the huge database of smart data we are building as we map the genome of the Brazilian law and how it is used.