Kat M. Albrecht, an assistant professor of criminal justice and criminology, and Adam Pah, the assistant dean for digital innovation in the Andrew Young School of Policy Studies, are working with a national interdisciplinary team using artificial intelligence (AI) to transform the legal system. After several years spent developing SCALES, the nation’s first AI-powered open data network created to provide free access to federal court records, they recently introduced SCALES to the public.

For the first time, the Systematic Content Analysis of Litigation EventS Open Knowledge Network (SCALES) makes court records that have long been theoretically public now meaningfully accessible and analyzable.

Backed by a team of legal scholars and practitioners, data scientists, engineers, journalists and public policy experts, SCALES seeks to develop next-generation legal data sets and tools. With over $6 million of support from the National Science Foundation, the team built an AI-powered data platform that makes the details of the federal judiciary available and accessible to every person. The first data explorer, The Federal Court Data Explorer, is now available and free to use at https://satyrn.scales-okn.org/sign-in.

To launch their findings, Albrecht and SCALES team member David Schwartz, a law professor at the Northwestern Pritzker School of Law, co-organized Data Justice: How Innovative Data is Transforming the Law at Northwestern Law in October 2023. During the symposium, SCALES and a diverse array of legal scholars including students, practitioners and faculty explored the new lines of research opened up by SCALES.

Schwartz and Albrecht then invited some of the speakers and other legal scholars to write articles for an issue of the Northwestern Law Review that featured the SCALES project and innovative uses of legal data. Northwestern Law Review Volume 119, Issue 1, was published the second week of September.

“SCALES originated with the realization of a significant data problem in our legal system … a persistent and systematic lack of data on the foundational workings of American courts,” Schwartz and Albrecht wrote in the forward. “The reason is that courts do not make their data truly transparent or meaningfully accessible to larger audiences. Despite this practice, courts acknowledge that their data must exist as public records. Court data is crucial to understand the inner workings of the legal system, identify successes and locate areas that require intervention to prevent injustice.”

Schwartz, Albrecht and Pah co-authored the essay, “The SCALES Project: Making Federal Court Records Free.” Georgia State’s Anne M. Tucker, an associate professor of law, co-authored, “Settlement as Construct: Defining and Counting Party Resolution in Federal District Court.” Albrecht also co-authored “Prosecutorial Data Transparency and Data Justice” and the forward. Link to the full publication here.

The future for the SCALES team is bright. Following successful Georgia State University Project RISE seed funding, Albrecht, Pah and William Sabol, a professor of criminal justice and criminology, won an additional $1.5 million grant from the National Science Foundation to focus on state- and local-level criminal court records. This work, which has begun in Georgia, has already produced important insights about the criminal legal system.