In this invited panel talk, we will examine a question – what does a successful toolchain for legislation eventually become? What happens when you succeed in automating legislation and your toolchain gets adopted?

We do this through one very long-term case study in tooling for modelling and automating legislation. In the early 1990s, a startup in Australia developed “STATUTE”, a radically productive toolchain for automating administrative law processes. Developed as a collaboration between an administrative lawyer and a computer programmer, and aiming for use in government and legal-aid “advice booth” settings, it was radical particularly because it focused on using a limited form of English natural language as the basis for knowledge representation (“the rules” or “the program”), allowing those trained in administrative law to directly implement and maintain the representation of the core rules. The computer programmer was not necessary as an intermediary in rule development and maintenance – a programming “language” or logic is present beneath the surface, but rule development and maintenance was in English.

STATUTE saw rapid application in government departments in Australia and New Zealand, with initial successes but also deep lessons about how automating legal processes also inevitably involves automating administrative and business processes. The technology transformed into “Ruleburst”, re-focusing as a rule engine for more general policy modelling. Acquired by Oracle it has undergone extensive development and very widespread adoption including for automating healthcare legislation administration in many US states. It now forms the core of Oracle Policy Modelling within Oracle Intelligent Advisor where legislative or business processes are authored and maintained by domain experts in automatable natural language.

Join us as we discuss the trajectory of this toolchain for automating legislation from early days to its present real-world practical incarnation.