In this paper we first introduce the working context related to the understanding of an heterogeneous network of references contained in the Italian regulatory framework. We then present an extended analysis of a large network of laws, providing several types of analytical evaluation that can be used within a legal management system for understanding the data through summarization, visualization, and browsing. In the legal domain, yet several tasks are strictly supervised by humans, with strong consumption of time and energy that would dramatically drop with the help of automatic or semi-automatic supporting tools. We overview different techniques and methodologies explaining how they can be helpful in actual scenarios.