On May 16, 2017, Professor Benjamin L. Liebman, Director of the Center for Chinese Legal Studies at Columbia Law School, visited CASS Law Institute and held a meeting with Professor Li Lin, Director of CASS Law Institute, and Professor Chen Zexian, Director of CASS Institute of International Law. During meeting, the hosts and the gust reviewed the results of the exchange and cooperation between Columbia Law School and the two CASS institutes and reached consensus on the future cooperation between them. Also attending the meeting were Professor Tian He, Director of CASS Center for the Study of National Indices of the Rule of Law, and Professor Liu Renwen, Head of Criminal Law Department of CASS Law Institute. After the meeting, Professor Liebman gave a lecture entitled “Big Data in the Judgments of Chinese Court: How to Turn Texts into Data” at the conference room of the two CASS institutes. The lecture was presided over by Professor Chen Zexian and attended by over 70 legal experts and scholars in Beijing. Professor Tian He and Professor Liu Renwen served as the two commentators at the lecture. In the lecture, Professor Liebman mainly shared the initial results of the explorations made by his team on the use tools of calculation in carrying out legal research on adjudicative documents of Chinese courts. After the lecture, Professor Tian He put forward opinions on Professor Liebman’s research results from the point of view of her own experience in participating in the informatization construction of the Supreme People’s Court and her work of assessment of judicial openness in China. Professor Liu Renwen gave positive appraisal of the exploration on new legal research methods carried out by Professor Liebman and his team and put forward his suggestions on how to combine qualitative and quantitative analyses in the thematic model. Professor Xiong Qiuhong, Head of the Procedure Law Department of CASS Law Institute, Professor Wang Yong from China University of Political Science and Law, and other participants of the lecture carried out heated discussions with Professor Liebman on such issues as the differences and commonalities between big data analysis and traditional statistical analysis, trend of technological development in judicial reform, ways of preventing the value orientation of computer programmers from influencing the results of data analysis, and the relationship between the publication of judicial documents on the Internet and legal retrieval services of commercial websites.