Legal exploration, analysis, and interpretation remain complex and demanding tasks, even for experienced legal scholars, due to the domain-specific language, tacit legal concepts, and intentional ambiguities embedded in legal texts. In related, text-based domains, Visual Analytics (VA) has become an indispensable tool for navigating documents, representing knowledge, and supporting analytical reasoning. However, legal scholarship presents distinct challenges: it requires managing formal legal structure, drawing on tacit domain knowledge, and documenting intricate and accurate reasoning processes - needs that current VA system designs for law fail to address adequately. We identify and describe key challenges and underexplored opportunities in applying VA to law, exploring how these technologies might better serve the legal domain. Interviews with nine legal experts reveal that current legal information retrieval interfaces do not adequately support the navigational complexity of law, often forcing users to rely on internalized legal expertise instead. To address this gap, we identify a three-phase workflow for legal experts, which highlights opportunities for VA to support legal reasoning through knowledge externalization and provenance tracking, leveraging tree-, graph-, and hierarchy-based visualizations. Through this contribution, our work establishes a user-centered VA workflow for the legal domain, recognizing tacit legal knowledge as a critical element of sense-making and insight generation, and situates these contributions within a broader research agenda for VA in law and other text-based disciplines.

翻译：法律探索、分析与解释仍然是复杂且要求极高的任务，即使对于经验丰富的法律学者而言也是如此，这归因于法律文本中蕴含的领域特定语言、隐性法律概念以及刻意设置的模糊性。在相关的基于文本的领域中，可视化分析已成为浏览文档、表示知识以及支持分析推理不可或缺的工具。然而，法律学术研究提出了独特的挑战：它需要管理正式的法律结构，借鉴隐性领域知识，并记录复杂且精确的推理过程——这些需求是当前面向法律的可视化分析系统设计未能充分满足的。我们识别并描述了将可视化分析应用于法律领域的关键挑战和尚未充分探索的机遇，探讨了这些技术如何能更好地服务于法律领域。对九位法律专家的访谈揭示，当前的法律信息检索界面未能充分支持法律领域的导航复杂性，往往迫使使用者依赖内化的法律专业知识。为弥补这一差距，我们提出了一个面向法律专家的三阶段工作流程，强调了可视化分析通过知识外化和溯源追踪来支持法律推理的机遇，利用基于树、图和层次结构的可视化方法。通过这一贡献，我们的工作为法律领域建立了一个以用户为中心的可视化分析工作流程，将隐性法律知识视为意义建构和洞察生成的关键要素，并将这些贡献置于法律及其他基于文本的学科中更广泛的可视化分析研究议程之中。