To what end? This isn’t like indexing EBay listings, where using standard structures and fields would help you categorize a large volume of low complexity information. Categorization and search of information are not tasks that take up much time in the law.

I just had a trial which turned on a couple of sentences in a contract. I could have a paralegal pull every relevant legal in a couple of hours, through “dumb” terms and connecters searching. More than a year of litigation boiled down to applying a rather small volume of law to a large volume of human facts. Even in appeals, which are case law heavy, the process of finding and categorizing the law takes vanishingly little time compared to synthesizing it into a legal framework, and applying it to a large volume of facts.

Good point! Some French jurisdictions are working on it: see "Towards more understandable decisions from the Court of Cassation (finally)" published last week https://bit.ly/2Ivhcgf

that's not how law works. you might be profit from reading

https://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/022608972X/

IANAL in the USA. In my experience, on average, lawyers would have hard times dealing even with pre-defined fields or even checkboxes to tick which law is being claimed for each argument.

Maybe machine translation of legal documents should be required in order to clarify the verbiage and identify problems in the source that confound the translation, as well as human comprehension.