Natural language processing techniques promise to automate an activity that lies at the core of many tasks performed by lawyers, namely the extraction and processing of information from unstructured text. The relevant methods are thought to be a key ingredient for both current and future legal tech applications. This chapter provides a non-technical overview of the current state of NLP techniques, focusing on their promise and potential pitfalls in the context of legal tech applications. It argues that, while NLP-powered legal tech can be expected to outperform humans in specific categories of tasks that play to the strengths of current ML techniques, there are severe obstacles to deploying these tools in other contexts, most importantly in tasks that require the equivalent of legal reasoning.

In the early 18th century, around 15,000 people fled southwestern Germany for the British Isles with the hopes that Queen Anne would send them to North America. Once they reached England, they established refugee camps near the Thames in and around London, raising fears of disease, competition of refugee artisans with locals, and other issues. Feeling the pressure, Queen Anne supported three resettlement schemes: one to shore up the Protestant presence in Ireland and two to produce naval stores (tar, pitch, turpentine, etc.) in North Carolina and New York. Naval stores were strategic materials used for shipbuilding and consequently European expansion around the world, yet their production involved onerous work in pine forests. The British, having denuded most of their forests for fuel and building materials, were dependent on Scandinavian sources for them. Although the two resettlement schemes targeting North America failed, they constituted early experiments with deploying immigrant labor for difficult, dangerous tasks in the New World.

Angeliki Lymberopoulou identifies the basic characteristics of the imagery of Hell (the Place of Hell Formed by the River of Fire, Individual Sinners and Communal Punishments), but highlights the absence of iconographical standardisation. Since Hell signified divergence from the preaching of the Orthodox Church and highlighted to the faithful the consequences of sin, it was often formed according to the degree to which communities were affected by each transgression. As such, the professions depicted offer us valuable insight into the economic structure of the society and the role of women within a male-dominant society. To highlight the significance of repentance, individual sinners are often placed at eye level, creating a telling proximity between sinners and churchgoers, who are brutally reminded of the significance their own deeds could have in determining their final destination – Paradise or Hell. It can be argued that Cretan imagery of Hell acts as the Church’s call for repentance from the faithful, encouraging social disapproval of those who transgress against penal and ethical law.

Angeliki Lymberopoulou identifies the basic characteristics of the imagery of Hell (the Place of Hell Formed by the River of Fire, Individual Sinners and Communal Punishments), but highlights the absence of iconographical standardisation. Since Hell signified divergence from the preaching of the Orthodox Church and highlighted to the faithful the consequences of sin, it was often formed according to the degree to which communities were affected by each transgression. As such, the professions depicted offer us valuable insight into the economic structure of the society and the role of women within a male-dominant society. To highlight the significance of repentance, individual sinners are often placed at eye level, creating a telling proximity between sinners and churchgoers, who are brutally reminded of the significance their own deeds could have in determining their final destination – Paradise or Hell. It can be argued that Cretan imagery of Hell acts as the Church’s call for repentance from the faithful, encouraging social disapproval of those who transgress against penal and ethical law.