And the links! OMG, you could trace precedents and justifications and citations all the way back to the ur-utterances of Hammurabi. Reading that stuff could be quite educational.
Former R&D director of legaltech company here. Lawyers already use tools that link everything.
For instance in the U.S., the Westlaw search engine for legal cases is such a tool, it can parse legal citations and turns them into hyperlinks. It rankes cases given a query based on a state-of-the art machine learning based IR method, and it is aware of cases in the ranking that are currently overturned by higher courts (shown as red flags) or being reviewed (shown as yellow flags).
The software can also predict the outcome of a legal case and recommend courses of action that makes winning more likely. It includes ruling statistics about all sitting judges.
Curiously, lawyers like to see the world as static, they do not like e.g. search results to differ between sessions, but of course cases get decided dynamically every day, which must necessarily also change the search results for any given query.
If people want to see what is the state of the art in AI and the law, I recommend you have a look at "AI & the Law" (ICAIL, the annual conference and the journal of the same name).
