Legality expressions are systematically pre-processed, organized, and stored to achieve faster real-time response, improved predictability, and increased reliability for queries against a large volume of legality expressions. Exponential improvements in both the time to locate the set of legality expressions matching specified search criteria and the processing costs of evaluating the request against the matching legality expressions are achieved using the disclosed systems, devices, and methods. The systems, devices, and methods are unique to the optimization of legality expression processing, but they can also enable the use of other optimization techniques for processing large amounts of data.