Supporting the legal Practitioner LKBS or the Web?

The legal practitioner is a knowledge worker. Two distinct technologies may be of assistance to this type of professional: legal knowledge‐based system technology and Internet World Wide Web technology. In this paper we investigate the relation between legal knowledge‐based systems and the Internet. Legal knowledge‐based systems have long been surrounded by much optimism, but despite the efforts over the last 20 years, the number of practical applications actually in use is still small. On the other hand, the WWW technology, which in a practical form has been around for only a few years, is gaining momentum and is expected to have a serious impact on many fields of society, including the legal domain. We look at both technologies and try to answer the question of where the future of both technologies lies.