Abstract: The present invention makes legal research more efficient by selecting clusters in response to the behavior of a user (e.g., a legal professional such as a paralegal, lawyer, or judge). The clusters, which are formed prior to the user accessing a legal document (and thus, providing user behavior to a system), are identified to the based upon a set of metadata associated with the legal document. At least two clusters are identified and a signal associated therewith is transmitted to the user. Each cluster is associated with a unique legal topic. Further, each cluster may comprise primary and/or secondary authority.

Abstract: Many companies provide online search facilities that enable users to conduct computerized searches for documents. Unfortunately, these searches frequently provide results that include duplicate documents—that is, documents that are completely or substantially identical to each other. This problem is particularly vexing when searching news stories, for example. Moreover, the duplicate documents are intermixed in the search results, leaving users to manually manage the complexities of identifying and/or filtering them. Accordingly, the present inventors devised systems, methods, and software that facilitate the identification and/or grouping of duplicate documents in search results.

Abstract: To facilitate access to public records, the present inventors devised, among other things, an entity resolution system. The exemplary system includes master records database of 300 million entities, which is partitioned into multiple distinct portions. The exemplary system extracts entity information from input public records and constructs one or more blocking queries against specific portions of the master records database to identify one or more sets of candidate records. Feature vectors are defined for the candidate records and machine learning techniques, such as Support Vector Machine, are used to determine which of the candidate records from the master records database match the input public records. Candidate records that match are logically associated with public records, enabling ready access via direct or indirect queries.