Nolo Acquired by Internet Brands, Says Lawyer Source

Nolo — the U.S. self-help legal publisher — has agreed to be acquired by Internet Brands for an undisclosed sum, effective 29 April 2011, according to Richard Granat, Esq.

According to Mr. Granat, the acquisition was disclosed in a letter from Nolo CEO Bob Dubow.

Nolo is of interest to the legal informatics community because Nolo is an innovator in online legal publishing and the publication of plain language legal information.

Mr. Granat plans to write about the acquisition later today on his eLawyering Blog.

HT @rgranat.

New from Lexum: Online Municipal Law Platform: Oyez Oyez

Lexum, the Canadian legal technology firm and creator and publisher of CanLII, has introduced a new online service — Oyez Oyez — providing full text access to Canadian municipal laws (including by-laws, ordinances, and regulations), proceedings of council meetings, and other municipal government documents.

Oyez Oyez is also available as an online publishing platform for municipal governments. To date, the municipalities of Saint-Adèle and Sainte-Catherine are participating in the service.

Click here for a video demonstrating Oyez Oyez.

Click here for Ivan Mokanov’s recent post about Oyez Oyez at Slaw.ca, the Canadian legal blog.

New from Justia: Daily Opinion Summaries

A new, free, daily online service — called Justia Daily Opinion Summaries — that publishes summaries of new decisions of the U.S. federal circuit courts of appeal and selected U.S. state supreme courts, is now available from Justia.

According to the original announcement: “All summaries [in Justia Daily Opinion Summaries] are written by licensed attorneys.” Users may filter feeds by court and practice area.

For more information, please see the posts about the service on Justia’s Onward blog.

April 22: Workshop on Law and Computation

A Workshop on Law and Computation will be held 22 April 2011 at the University of Houston Law Center in Houston, Texas, USA.

The workshop is hosted by the Law Center’s Program on Law and Computation.

According to the workshop announcement:

The workshop will provide opportunities to show ways in which advanced computation can aid in the understanding of law and will demonstrate techniques from the fields of statistics, evolutionary computation, data mining, artificial intelligence, computational linguistics, and networks.

Presenters at the workshop are scheduled to include:

• Dr. Stephen Wolfram of Wolfram Research;
• Professor Paul Ohm of the University of Colorado School of Law;
• Carl Malamud of Public.Resource.Org and the Law.Gov legal open government data movement;
• Daniel Martin Katz of the University of Michigan’s Center for the Study of Complex Systems and Computational Legal Studies;
• Emile de Maat of the Leibniz Center for Law at the University of Amsterdam;
• Michael Bommarito of Computational Legal Studies;
• Prof. Alan Izenman of Temple University;
• Mark Kotanchek of Evolved Analytics;
• Prof. Chris Reed of the University of Dundee;
• Prof. Ted. Sichelman of the University of San Diego; and
• Prof. Harry Surden of the University of Colorado.

For more information, please see the workshop announcement.

Video Now Available: NELIC 2011: New and Emerging Legal Infrastructures Conference

Video is now available for NELIC 2011: The New and Emerging Legal Infrastructures Conference, held 15 April 2011 at the University of California, Berkeley School of Law, Boalt Hall, in Berkeley, California, USA.

The conference panels include:

• Quantitative Legal Prediction;
• Legal Automation;
• Legal User Interface Design; and
• Startups in the Law.

Click here for the conference program.

Click here for posts about particular presentations at NELIC 2011.

HT @LSNTAP.

Goyal on Technology, Access to Justice, and MyLegalBriefcase

Monica Goyal, J.D., M.Sc., of MyLegalBriefcase gave a presentation on technology, access to justice, and MyLegalBriefcase at the “Startups in the Law” panel at NELIC 2011: The New and Emerging Legal Infrastructures Conference, held 15 April 2011 at the University of California, Berkeley School of Law, Boalt Hall, in Berkeley, California, USA.

In her presentation, Ms. Goyal discusses MyLegalBriefcase, an innovative interactive online service that provides customized forms and procedural instructions for self-represented litigants in Small Claims Court Ontario.

In the discussion following the presentation, Ms. Goyal discusses several topics, including legal education reform, ways to improve access to justice, and issues facing legal technology entrepreneurs.

Poulshock on Legal Knowledge Systems and the Hammurabi Project

[Update 20 April 2011: Click here for video of the panel containing this presentation. Click here for videos of the entire NELIC conference. HT @LSNTAP.]

Michael Poulshock, Esq., of Stanford University’s CodeX Center for Computers and Law has posted his remarks given at the “Legal Automation” panel at NELIC 2011: The New and Emerging Legal Infrastructures Conference, held 15 April 2011 at the University of California, Berkeley School of Law, Boalt Hall, in Berkeley, California, USA.

The post describes Mr. Poulshock’s views on legal knowledge systems. Mr. Poulshock then explains those views in the context of his Hammurabi Project, “an open source project whose goal is to convert portions of U.S. law into source code, and to make it freely available for anyone to use.”

Mr. Poulshock explains The Hammurabi Project as follows:

The idea is that you should be able to take a provision of the U.S. Code, for example, and then go and find the source code version of it. So you’d have legal source material on one hand, and then you’d have this parallel corpus of the law on the other, in the C# programming language.

Click here to read the entire post.

Click here to read Mr. Poulshock’s earlier post on “Rule-based Legal Information Systems” at VoxPopuLII.

Mochales and Moens on Argumentation Mining in ECHR Texts

Rachel Mochales Palau and Professor Dr. Marie-Francine Moens, both of Katholieke Universiteit Leuven Afdeling Informatica, have published Argumentation Mining, forthcoming in Artificial Intelligence and Law. Here is the abstract:

Argumentation mining aims to automatically detect, classify and structure argumentation in text. Therefore, argumentation mining is an important part of a complete argumentation analyisis, i.e. understanding the content of serial arguments, their linguistic structure, the relationship between the preceding and following arguments, recognizing the underlying conceptual beliefs, and understanding within the comprehensive coherence of the specific topic. We present different methods to aid argumentation mining, starting with plain argumentation detection and moving forward to a more structural analysis of the detected argumentation. Different state-of-the-art techniques on machine learning and context free grammars are applied to solve the challenges of argumentation mining. We also highlight fundamental questions found during our research and analyse different issues for future research on argumentation mining.

The techniques discussed in the paper are illustrated in part through their application to a corpus of texts issued by the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR).

Apps for Justice Project Recognized

The “Apps for Justice” proposal — created by a team including Marc Lauritsen, Esq., of Capstone Practice Systems; Professor Ronald W. Staudt of the Illinois Institute of Technology Chicago-Kent College of Law; and John P. Mayer, Executive Director of CALI: The Center for Computer-Assisted Legal Instruction — to “expand programs in which [law] students write software as part of their [legal] education,” was recognized at this weekend’s Future Ed 3 Conference with an award of a virtual dollar venture capital investment.

The proposal includes further development of law-school clinical programs that use the A2J Author software created by CALI and the Center for Access to Justice and Technology.

Click here for more information about A2J Author.

HT @sglassmeyer and @johnpmayer.

McCarty on Natural Language Processing and Judicial Decisions

Professor Dr. L. Thorne McCarty of the Rutgers University Department of Computer Science has posted lecture videos and other materials in connection with his recent graduate course on Natural Language Processing. The course uses examples from a judicial decision: Carter v. Exxon Company USA, 177 F.3d 197 (3d Cir. 1999).

For more information, please see Professor McCarty’s discussion of these course materials in the IAAIL LinkedIn Group.