eLawyering Standards: Draft from ABA LPM

New draft standards for practicing law online were recently issued by the American Bar Association Law Practice Management Section’s eLawyering Task Force. The draft is entitled Suggested Minimum Requirements for Law Firms Delivering Legal Services Online.

The draft standards address the following issues:

• Legal ethics, with particular emphasis on unauthorized practice of law, advertising/marketing rules, and clients’ confidential information;
• “Web Site Architecture”;
• Disclaimers;
• “Terms and Conditions Statement[s]“;
• Retainer agreements;
• “On-Line Payment of Legal Fees”; and
• “Protecting Client Confidences.”

When completed, the standards will include forms for retainer agreements and disclaimers.

The draft standards build upon the ABA Best Practice Guidelines for Legal Information Web Site Providers (2003).

The task force invites ABA members to join the task force’s listserv. The task force also welcomes comments on the draft standards from ABA members, who may send comments to the task force via the listserv, or by contacting task force members here.

For more information, please see the draft standards and the task force’s Website.

HT @rgranat.

Law & Neuroscience Research at Stanford

A very interesting recent article highlights innovative research in law and neuroscience at Stanford Law School. In The court will now call its expert witness: the brain, Stanford Report, Nov. 19, 2009, Ingfei Chen surveys recent neuroscience-related research and other activities of the Stanford Center for Law and the Biosciences, the Stanford Interdisciplinary Group on Neuroscience and Society, the Law & Neuroscience Project, and the Stanford Criminal Justice Center.

In the article, Stanford neuroscience and law experts discuss a range of issues including:

• Brain Electrical Oscillations Signature (BEOS);
• functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) lie detection technology;
• the relationship of neuroscience to “criminal responsibility and prediction and treatment of criminal behavior”;
• “the impacts of neuroscience on legal decision making”;
• neuroscientific evidence in murder cases, to exonerate defendants or mitigate punishment;
• uses of neuroscience technology in parole and other areas of criminal justice administration; and
• the potential for neuroscience tools to improve outcomes in drug-related cases.

HT @TheJuryExpert.

Wyner on Annotating Rules in Legislation

Dr. Adam Wyner of the University College London Department of Computer Science has posted Annotating Rules in Legislation, summarizing his recent “discussions about text mining and annotating rules in legislation with several people (John Sheridan of The Office of Public Sector Information, Richard Goodwin of The Stationery Office, and John Cyriac of Compliance Track).”

Dr. Wyner outlines a plan to use GATE: the General Architecture for Text Engineering, to “develop a legislative processing tool,” that would assist legislators in drafting statutes and regulations that would be readily processable and retrievable by machines, and that would enable automated semantic representation and annotation of the legal content of statutes and regulations, using a legal ontology.

Charbonneau on Free Access to Law in the Era of User-Generated Content

Olivier Charbonneau, LL.M., a librarian à l’Université Concordia, has posted his thesis entitled La jurisprudence en accès libre à l’ère du contenu généré par les usagers (2008). Here is the abstract:

“User generated content and collaboration, also called « Web 2.0 », offer new possibilities in the context of a thriving and open Internet. Digital environments that employ these production mechanisms allow user communities to enrich a virtual space. Using a constructivist approach, we explore how collaboration can serve the users of an open access database of court rulings, namely the Canadian Legal Information Institute’s website (www.CanLII.org). Collaboration is set within a framework that we name the « Collaboration Framework ». There are two classes of objects, users and documents, that interact following four relationships : links between documents, exchanges between users, writing (from users to documents) and consumption (from documents to users). In turn, we can better understand how collaboration functions, given a specific class of documents. Following an analysis of court rulings as a system of documents and an illustration of user needs in civil society, the Collaboration Framework is applied to an open access database of court rulings in order to determine how users can enrich the system’s content. This thesis was submitted to the ‘Faculté des études supérieures’ of the ‘Université de Montréal’ for the LL.M. degree, Information Technology Law option.”

HT @iinek.

Wyner on Onto Root Gazetteer

Dr. Adam Wyner of the University College London Department of Computer Science has posted detailed notes on Onto Root Gazetteer (ORG), a plugin for GATE, the General Architecture for Text Engineering. This post may be of interest to researchers or developers using GATE for automatic text processing of legal documents.

Dr Wyner explains that “ORG annotates [a] text with respect to [a designated] ontology.” In his post, Dr. Wyner “present[s] User Manual notes for ORG, references to ORG, and some discussion.”

Call for Papers: ICCBR 2010

A call for papers and proposals has been issued for ICCBR 2010: the 18th International Conference on Case-Based Reasoning, to be held July 19-22, 2010, in Alessandria, Italy. Here are the submission deadlines:

• Doctoral Consortium (Mentor): January 9, 2010;
• Workshops: January 11, 2010;
• Papers: February 15, 2010;
• Applications Track: February 16, 2010;
• Doctoral Consortium (Student): April 17, 2010;
• Computer Cooking Contest: April 24, 2010

Papers are invited on the following topics:

• Case and knowledge representation, acquisition, modeling, visualization, maintenance and management for CBR
• CBR system design issues (e.g., indexing, retrieval, similarity assessment and adaptation)
• System architectures and integration of CBR with other methods
• Collaborative agent architectures involving CBR
• Analogical reasoning, cognitive models, and creative reasoning approaches based on CBR
• Formal, empirical, and psychological evaluations of CBR models and systems
• Methodologies for developing CBR applications
• Lazy-learning, instance-based learning and case-based learning
• Case-based planning topics including plan adaptation, retrieval from a plan library and plan similarity
• Case-based approaches to scheduling, design and robot navigation
• CBR and knowledge discovery, data mining, text mining
• CBR software reuse and engineering redesign
• Explanations, Context, and confidence in CBR
• Peer-to-Peer Networks and CBR
• CBR in the Semantic Web
• CBR foundations
• Conversational CBR
• Textual CBR
• Distributed CBR
• CBR and uncertainty
• CBR in design, diagnosis, health, law, education
• Knowledge management in CBR, case and experience-based knowledge management
• Case-based recommender systems
• Applications of CBR (e.g., in customer support, education, electronic commerce, pattern recognition, image processing, legal reasoning, manufacturing and medicine)
• Adaptive interfaces, user modeling, customization & personalization using CBR
• Computer models of case-based argumentation
• Fielded applications of CBR

A Doctoral Consortium, at which Ph.D. students present their dissertations in progress, will be held in conjunction with the conference on July 20, 2010. Please see the deadlines above.

For more information, please see the call for papers or the conference Website.

URN:LEX : A Uniform Resource Name Namespace for Sources of Law

An Internet-Draft of URN:LEX : A Uniform Resource Name Namespace for Sources of Law, has been published by Institute of Legal Information Theory and Techniques of the Italian National Research Council (ITTIG/CNR); Italy, National Centre for ICT in Public Administration (CNIPA); Brazil, Federal Senate, IT Department (PRODASEN); and Cornell Law School Legal Information Institute (LII). The contacts for the draft are Professor Enrico Francesconi & Pierluigi Spinosa, both of ITTIG/CNR, and Caterina Lupo of CNIPA. Here is a description of the draft standard:

“The purpose of the ‘lex’ namespace is to assign an unequivocal identifier, in standard format, to documents that are sources of law. The identifier is conceived so that its construction depends only on the characteristics of the document itself and is, therefore, independent from the document’s on-line availability, its physical location, and access mode. ‘Sources of law’ include any legal document within the domain of legislation (including bills), case law and administrative acts or regulations. This identifier will be used as a way to represent the references (and more generally, any type of relation) among the various sources of law. In an on-line environment with resources distributed among different Web publishers, uniform resource names allow simplified global interconnection of legal documents by means of automated hypertext linking.”

Romano, Il procedimento legislativo digitale: vincoli normativi e soluzioni tecniche

Francesco Romano, a researcher at Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche, Istituto di Teoria e Tecniche dell’Informazione Giuridica (ITTIG-CNR), has published Il procedimento legislativo digitale: vincoli normativi e soluzioni tecniche (2009). Here is a summary:

“…Come abbiamo visto il Codice dell’amministrazione digitale cerca di costituire un rimedio a una certa precarietà normativa che non ha facilitato il diffondersi degli strumenti ICT presso la Pubblica Amministrazione. Lo stesso CAD impone una serie di obblighi per digitalizzare la P.A. ma prevede poi dei limiti costituiti nell’ordine:

• dall’autonomia normativa degli enti,
• da questioni di opportunità,
• dalla disponibilità di idonee risorse tecnologiche,
• dalla normativa vigente,
• dall’emanazione di norme tecniche future.

“Nel procedimento legislativo sembrerebbe che con poche modifiche
legislative si dovrebbe potere prevedere la digitalizzazione dell’intero
flusso documentario presente nelle diverse istituzioni che producono
norme.

“Ma a ben vedere una serie di leggi e regolamenti impongono ancora che durante l’iter la proposta di atto legislativo e gli emendamenti ad essa, siano stampati su carta, oppure che la procedura di emanazione di una delibera comunale si concluda con la sua affissione presso un albo. Introdurre nuove leggi, così come pensare a soluzioni tecnologiche sempre più efficienti ed innovative da testare nel campo della Pubblica Amministrazione e più in generale come soluzioni di e-government può dunque non portare i risultati sperati se prima non si effettua una ricognizione di quelle norme o almeno di alcune fra esse che poi interrompono il flusso digitale che si vorrebbe introdurre.

“Nei capitoli che seguono sarà effettuata una verifica delle norme che a vario livello impediscono l’attuarsi dell’iter legislativo digitale. Partendo dalle norme costituzionali, si analizzerà la disciplina che regola l’iter legislativo parlamentare, per poi analizzare alcuni Statuti regionali e regolamenti consiliari per l’iter legislativo in uso nelle Regioni italiane, fino ad arrivare al flusso che regola l’emanazione degli atti normativi degli enti locali.

“In questo lavoro saranno evidenziate le esperienze di alcune regioni italiane in particolare Umbria, Toscana, Piemonte.”

Calo, Robotics & The Law: Liability For Personal Robots

M. Ryan Calo, Esq., a residential fellow at Stanford Law School’s Center for Internet & Society, has posted an abstract of an article in progress, entitled Section 230 Immunity for Personal Robotics. Here is the abstract:

“The field of personal robotics holds enormous promise, but robot-related injuries have already begun to occasion litigation. In 1999, for instance, a woman settled a lawsuit with her employer when a mail delivery robot allegedly pinned her against a wall, fracturing her toe and causing other injuries. Such incidents will multiply as we approach the millions of personal robots UN and other statistical models anticipate within the next few years. Lawsuits will invariably name robotics manufactures as defendants and early plaintiffs are likely to include highly sympathetic populations such as the elderly.

“As with personal computers, personal robots will be designed to be versatile. Many robots under development are essentially platforms that can be programmed, instructed, or remotely operated; others learn from their environment or respond to context; still others run on open source (i.e., multiple contributor) software. This blending of control means that there is no obvious way to apply standard concepts of tort – such as foreseeability, misuse, disclosure, and intentionality – to some of the most likely scenarios involving robot-related harm. The sheer complexity of robotics systems also make it possible that safety measures could prevent harm in some contexts but help cause it in others.

“The resulting legal uncertainty could discourage the flow of capital into robotics or narrow robot functionality, placing the United States behind other countries with a higher bar to litigation (and a head start). This essay explores the best legal infrastructure to prioritize safety and compensate victims while preserving the conditions for innovation and investment. The essay tentatively proposes a system modeled on our experience with the Internet. The generalized immunity enjoyed by websites under the Communications Decency Act for user content and filtering has permitted web services to proliferate and thrive. A ‘section 230 for personal robotics’ could limit legal risk to the manufacturer where the owner programmed, instructed, or ‘taught’ the robot to take the action at issue or where the harm resulted from a valid safety mechanism.”

Mr. Calo has provided more detail about the paper in his recent blogpost, entitled Robotics & The Law: Liability For Personal Robots.

HT @InternetLaw.

Conference on Privacy and Public Access to Court Records

The 7th Conference on Privacy and Public Access to Court Records will be held on March 4 and 5, 2010 in Williamsburg, Virginia, USA. The conference is sponsored by the Center for Legal and Court Technology and the National Center for State Courts, with assistance from the Administrative Office of the United States Courts. Topics to be discussed at the conference include:

• Where Have We Been and Where Are We Going?: A Decade of Court Public Access and Privacy Policy Development
• Court Public Access Policy Implementation: Recent Developments
• Emerging Issues in E-filing and Privacy
• Bulk Data: Latest Trends
• New Media in the Courtroom and at the Courthouse: Texts, Tweets & Blogs, Oh My!
• Privacy and the Public Record: The Big Picture Debate
• Public Electronic Access to Federal Court Records “PACER”: New Initiatives, New Challenges

For more information, please see the conference announcement.

HT Court Technology Bulletin.