Automated small business legal counseling systems

The author reviews expert systems currently under development for automating small business legal counseling services. The core of these systems is an automated legal audit, which reviews and analyzes the operational and organizational status of a small business. Such systems would require both forward and backward chaining abilities, both case- and rule-based reasoning, a rich hypertext system, the ability to contact online information systems and to assimilate the information derived, and automated document generation capabilities. Although the systems are still being built, a major feature will be their ability to formulate queries to search and retrieve information from online services and then incorporate such information into their analyses