From Design Changes to Lawsuits: An Exploratory Study Using Text Analytics Based on Legal Case Database

Design change is a major issue influencing construction productivity and if handled inappropriately, may lead to lawsuits in extreme cases. Canadian Legal Information Institute (CanLII) database is an open database that houses massive construction legal case document, each containing thousands of words detailing the judge’s deliberation that leads to the final decision. The study proposes a manual labelling method for legal documents and takes a Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) modelling approach as the primary tool to provide fast and accurate categorization and identification of the legal cases. The study concludes that the LDA method can classify and identify legal cases. Exploratory in nature, this study nevertheless confirms the potential of the CanLII database for knowledge discovery in construction management research.