Courtroom Decision Support System Using Case Based Reasoning

The legal practices in our country have not seen any major changes in terms of technology advancement for decades. While decision support system finding inroads in many other specialized areas, there has been no work done to bring decision support system into legal environment. It is extremely a lengthy waiting period of time to bring a case to court, let alone the whole process of trial until the judgment day. To address this problem, it is suggested to convert our current legal practice into an intelligent based decision support system. A study was conducted by developing a prototype applying a decision support technique to serve as a "virtual courtroom" to plaintiff and defendant in solving their legal cases without the involvement of actual trial. To ensure the system produces fair solutions, case based reasoning was identified as the most suitable technique. This paper proposes the application of case based reasoning in solving legal cases due to the characteristics of the technique which resembles human cognition in solving problems. (C) 2014 Manoranjithan a/p Muniandy. Published by Elsevier Ltd.