Legal Technology Institute Goes Private

The University of Florida Legal Technology Institute has ceased its affiliation with the university, and has merged with Adkins Consulting Group, to form a new entity called the Legal Technology Institute, according to an announcement by the Institute’s director, Andrew Z. Adkins III.

According to the announcement, “[t]he Institute provides independent legal technology consulting services and market research services for the legal profession.”

For more information, please see the Institute’s new Website.

HT Monica Bay of Law Technology News.

Call for Participation: Zotero Bluebook Development

Professor Frank Bennett of the Nagoya University Graduate School of Law has asked me to post the following message, and to invite interested individuals to participate in this exciting project:

“Zotero and the Bluebook are about to become good friends.

[NOTE: Zotero is a popular open source bibliographic management software application, and The Bluebook is a legal citation standard, widely used in the US.]

With changes merged over the past several weeks, the development trunk version of Zotero has acquired the basic capabilities needed for legal writing. After a year and a half of work on the processor, we have a user interface and we’re ready for action of a sort.

From this point, the project will benefit greatly from the input of actual legal writers. Unfortunately, there are very few lawyers in the Zotero community at present, for the obvious-enough reason that Zotero has until now not been terribly useful for things legal.

[...] I would be looking for people who are comfortable with a few basic technical things (installing Firefox, installing plugins), who are able to invest a small amount of time playing with software with limited and occasionally broken functionality, and who have the patience to report a bit of detail when things do not work correctly — beta testers for alpha software.

Building the full-wax version of Bluebook and related styles will take a little time, but at this point I’m pretty confident that Zotero for law will become a tool of choice for law students, and that the tool has the potential to colonize the professional space in due course. On
that hopeful note, here are links to the forum and utilities:

zotero-legal (Google group): A forum for discussion and a repository of notes and proposals: http://groups.google.com/group/zotero-legal

Zotero development trunk (main and word-processor plugins): The utilities that run in Firefox: http://www.zotero.org/support/dev/svn_and_trac_access#trunk

Bluebook style (CSL 1.0): The current version of the Bluebook style in CSL 1.0: http://gsl-nagoya-u.net/http/pub/bluebook-demo-x.csl“

If you would like to participate, please contact Professor Frank Bennett. If you know of a colleague who might be interested in participating, please feel free to share this information with them.

Videos Available for CALICon 2010

Videos are now available of many of the programs presented at CALICon 2010: The 20th Annual Conference for Law School Computing, held 24-26 June 2010 at the Rutgers Camden School of Law in Camden, New Jersey, USA.

Click here for video of Tom Bruce‘s plenary. Click here for a transcript.

Click here and here for videos of other programs held at the conference.

Click here for the main conference program.

Click here for PDF versions of the main conference program.

Click here for the wiki for the unconference that began the conference.

Click here for the archived Twitter tweets from the conference, courtesy of Professor Jonathan Ezor.

Discussions begun at the conference are continuing on the teknoids listserv and on Twitter under hashtag #teknoids.

Rutter & Goodenough on Digital Lawyering in the Law School Curriculum

Brock Rutter, Esq. of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University, and Professor Oliver R. Goodenough of Vermont Law School and the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University, will present a paper entitled Digital Lawyering in the Law School Curriculum, at SubTech 2010: The 11th International Conference on Substantive Technology in Legal Education and Practice, to be held 1-3 July 2010, at the University of Zaragoza, in Zaragoza, Spain. Here is the abstract:

Developments in technology have long influenced the substance and practice of law. The advent of relatively cheap printing in the 19th Century, and its application to legal opinions after the decision in Wheaton v. Peters in 1834 was an essential – if underappreciated – factor in the move from aphorisms and treatise quotes to a more sophisticated mode of case analysis in American legal education and practice. The resulting Langdellian revolution, with its close attention to text and appellate opinions, has been dominant in American law schools so long that we take it for granted, but it is the product of a particular level of technological advancement. Computing and other digital technologies are similarly transforming how we practice law and think about legal issues, but these developments have yet to gain widespread acceptance into the law school curriculum. The time is ripe for correcting this omission: law students should be taught about the technologies affecting the legal profession and the effects they bring.

There are pioneering efforts to bridge this gap, a sadly-too-small group of courses focusing on the impact of digital technology to on substantive legal work. We joined this band this past year, and taught a course on digital lawyering at Vermont Law School in the spring of 2010. We are enthusiastic converts to the belief that courses about legal technology and the use of technology by lawyers should be included widely in the law school curriculum. This article will describe the factors that lead us to this conclusion, will outline subjects that could be explored in such courses, and will conclude with observations drawn from our own particular version of such a course. A brief syllabus is included as an appendix. We recognize that we included multiple subject areas that could have merited independent classes. Nevertheless, the fact that the course existed at all represents another foot in the door for teaching technology issues in law school.

For the full text of the paper, please contact the authors.

Thanks to the authors for providing the abstract.

Demo Available of Digital LLC Project, from Law Lab at Berkman Center

A demo is available of Digital LLC, “open-source software that provides entrepreneurs with the tools to take advantage of Vermont’s recent [...] legislation allowing ‘virtual LLCs’ and ‘virtual corporations’ to achieve full legal status and to exist entirely in digital form.”

Digital LLC is a project of the Law Lab at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University.

According to the announcement, “Digital LLC guides entrepreneurs in building the two main components that govern the management of an LLC: the Operating Agreement and the Articles of Organization. Once these key documents are agreed upon by the designated LLC members, the software allows users to make all management decisions digitally for the entire existence of the LLC.”

Magdy & Jones on Examining the Robustness of Evaluation Metrics for Patent Retrieval with Incomplete Relevance Judgements

Walid Magdy and Dr. Gareth J. F. Jones, both of the Dublin City University School of Computing, will present a paper entitled Examining the Robustness of Evaluation Metrics for Patent Retrieval with Incomplete Relevance Judgements, at CLEF 2010: The Conference on Multilingual and Multimodal Information Access Evaluation, to be held 20-23 September 2010 in Padua, Italy. Here is the abstract:

Recent years have seen a growing interest in research into patent retrieval. One of the key issues in conducting information retrieval (IR) research is meaningful evaluation of the effectiveness of the retrieval techniques applied to task under investigation. Unlike many existing well explored IR tasks where the focus is on achieving high retrieval precision, patent retrieval is to a significant degree a recall focused task. The standard evaluation metric used for patent retrieval evaluation tasks is currently mean average precision (MAP). However this does not reflect system recall well. Meanwhile, the alternative of using the standard recall measure does not reflect user search effort, which is a significant factor in practical patent search environments. In recent work we introduce a novel evaluation metric for patent retrieval evaluation (PRES) (Magdy and Jones, SIGIR 2010). This is designed to reflect both system recall and user effort. Analysis of PRES demonstrated its greater effectiveness in evaluating recall-oriented applications than standard MAP and Recall. One dimension of the evaluation of patent retrieval which has not previously been studied is the effect on reliability of the evaluation metrics when relevance judgements are incomplete. We provide a study comparing the behaviour of PRES against the standard MAP and Recall metrics for varying incomplete judgements in patent retrieval. Experiments carried out using runs from the CLEF-IP 2009 datasets show that PRES and Recall are more robust than MAP for incomplete relevance sets for this task with a small preference to PRES as the most robust evaluation metric for patent retrieval with respect to the completeness of the relevance set.

For the full text of the paper, please contact the authors.

Thanks to the authors for providing the abstract.

Shecter Wins CivicApps for Greater Portland Best Idea Award

Robb Shecter, creator of OregonLaws.org and WebLaws.org, has won the 2010 CivicApps for Greater Portland Best Idea Award.

Robb won for his proposal called Community-Contributed Datasets, of which his OregonLaws.org legal glossary is an example.

Click here for Robb’s discussion of his proposal.

Please join me in congratulating Robb!

HT @lawlib.

Bladow on Opening the Courts: Using Technology to Empower the Unrepresented

A video is available of a presentation by Kate Bladow of Pro Bono Net, entitled Opening the Courts: Using Technology to Empower the Unrepresented, given 25 May 2010 at Gov 2.0 Expo 2010 in Washington, DC, USA.

The presentation concerns “courts’ use of technology to help those without lawyers, including Pro Bono Net‘s LawHelp Interactive service.” LawHelp Interactive incorporates HotDocs and A2J Author.

A2J Author is an innovative, Drupal-based online interviewing and document assembly system co-developed by The Center for Access to Justice & Technology (CAJT) at Chicago-Kent College of Law, and the Center for Computer-Assisted Legal Instruction (CALI).

Click here for more information on A2J Author.

Zhang & Walton on Recent Trends in Evidence Law in China and the New Evidence Scholarship

Dr. Nanning Zhang of China University of Political Science and Law, and Professor Douglas Walton of the University of Windsor Centre for Research in Reasoning, Argumentation and Rhetoric, have published Recent Trends in Evidence Law in China and the New Evidence Scholarship, 9 Law, Probability and Risk Issue No. 2, pages 103-129 (2010). Here is the abstract:

This paper reviews the history and status quo of evidence theory in China and analyses its gradual shift from a pluralistic evidence law to a model informed by scientific evidence scholarship. It compares fundamental distinctions on evidence and judicial proof between the contemporary evidence theories of China and those in Anglo-American law. The paper reveals that no matter what the evidence system is, the common method of discovering truth plays an important role in the modernization of evidence theory as such theory moves towards a comprehensive evidence scholarship. By shedding light on the theoretical framework of a comprehensive evidence scholarship and the increasing use of scientific ideas in evidence law, our theoretical perspective shows that the framework of a comprehensive evidence scholarship consists of four interdependent and overlapping components.

The authors further state:

The reader should note that the concept of ‘new evidence scholarship’ used in this paper is different from the expression ‘new evidence scholarship’ coined by Richard O. Lempert in his article ‘The New Evidence Scholarship: Analyzing the Process of Proof’ (1986) 66 Boston University Law Review 439.

Wechsler on Japanese, Chinese, Korean, and Indian Patent Information: Asia’s Rising Role in Technology Disclosure through the Patent System

Andrea Wechsler, LL.M., of Max-Planck-Institut für Geistiges Eigentum, Wettbewerbs- und Steuerrecht has published Japanese, Chinese, Korean, and Indian Patent Information: Asia’s Rising Role in Technology Disclosure through the Patent System, 2 Tsinghua China Law Review, Issue No. 1, Fall 2009, pages 101-158.

Here is the abstract:

Patent information – as a form of technology disclosure – serves an important function in business strategy as well as in industrial policy making. This study first discusses the role of patent information for technology disclosure before showing the rising importance of patents in Asia (Japan, Korea, China, India) as source of technological information. It demonstrates both the substantial increase of Asian patents in force from the 1980s to 2006 and the increase of Asian patent grants from the 1990s to 2006. Furthermore, Asian patent grants for every billion U.S. Dollar of the gross domestic product (in current prices of the period measured) are analyzed as is the ratio of patent grants to patent applications in Japan, Korea, China, and India. Analyses of the availability of and access to patent information in Asia demonstrate that patent information is easily accessible, while its relevance is hard to detect. In consequence, this paper argues that the increasing relevance of Asian patent information needs to be complemented with the provision of competitive databases that contain value-added patent information allowing for high quality search results.