Justia Shares Case Summaries with Fastcase

Justia has begun sharing its summaries of U.S. state and federal court decisions with online legal research provider Fastcase, according to a press release issued 20 December 2011.

This arrangement is of interest to the legal informatics community, because it constitutes another example of the sharing of metadata among alternative legal information providers, for purposes of enhancing access to legal information and increasing competition in the commercial legal research services market. The arrangement is also of interest because it represents cooperation between an online legal information provider that primarily offers information for free, and one that operates primarily on a fee-based or contractual model.

Justia offers its case summaries free of charge, while Fastcase will include the summaries in its commercial legal research service.

For more information, please see the press release.

Boulet, Mazzega, and Bourcier on A Network Approach to the French System of Legal Codes Part 1

Dr. Romain Boulet of UMR ESPACE-DEV, IRD; Dr. Pierre Mazzega of UnB/IRD and UPS (OMP), CNRS, IRD; and Dr. Danièle Bourcier of CERSA CNRS, have published A network approach to the French system of legal codes—part I: analysis of a dense network, Artificial Intelligence and Law, 19, 333-355 (2011). Here is the abstract:

We explore one aspect of the structure of a codified legal system at the national level using a new type of representation to understand the strong or weak dependencies between the various fields of law. In Part I of this study, we analyze the graph associated with the network in which each French legal code is a vertex and an edge is produced between two vertices when a code cites another code at least one time. We show that this network distinguishes from many other real networks from a high density, giving it a particular structure that we call concentrated world and that differentiates a national legal system (as considered with a resolution at the code level) from small-world graphs identified in many social networks. Our analysis then shows that a few communities (groups of highly wired vertices) of codes covering large domains of regulation are structuring the whole system. Indeed we mainly find a central group of influent codes, a group of codes related to social issues and a group of codes dealing with territories and natural resources. The study of this codified legal system is also of interest in the field of the analysis of real networks. In particular we examine the impact of the high density on the structural characteristics of the graph and on the ways communities are searched for. Finally we provide an original visualization of this graph on an hemicyle-like plot, this representation being based on a statistical reduction of dissimilarity measures between vertices. In Part II (a following paper) we show how the consideration of the weights attributed to each edge in the network in proportion to the number of citations between two vertices (codes) allows deepening the analysis of the French legal system.

Legal Technology and Information Systems at NLADA 2011

Slides and materials have been posted for several presentations on legal technology or legal information systems, given at NLADA 2011: The National Legal Aid and Defender Association Annual Conference, held 7-10 December 2011 in Washington, DC, USA.

The conference theme was “Innovations in Civil Legal Services.”

Here are the legal technologies or information systems I’ve identified in the slides or materials:

• Illinois Legal Aid app, which provides “[p]lain language legal information includ[ing] FAQs, step-by-step instructions and referrals to helpful organizations,” by Illinois Legal Aid;
• Illinois Pro Bono app, which offers “primers on Illinois law, volunteer opportunity search, and calendar of upcoming legal events, including MCLE trainings,” for lawyers who want to provide pro bono legal services, by Illinois Legal Aid;
• “[A]n interactive online decision tree, using the A2J [Author] software… to help litigants, practitioners and judges parse” the Uniform Child Custody Jurisdiction and Enforcement Act, by the DC Family Court Self Help Center;
• Electronic document management system and mobile access to documents and data, by Memphis Area Legal Services, Inc.;
• Data analysis to “identify unmet” client needs, … “gauge the effectiveness of specific legal strategies,” and “measure our progress toward achieving our existing strategic goals,” by Legal Aid Society of Cleveland;
• Client intake decision guides, by Legal Assistance Foundation of Metropolitan Chicago;
• Online county-based legal self-help centers [such as the center for Will County], by Illinois Legal Aid Online;
• LiveHelp (e.g., go to http://www.illinoislegalaid.org/, and click on “LiveHelp”), “an instant messaging service that provides remote navigation assistance to website users seeking legal information,” by Illinois Legal Aid Online.
• AyudaLegalIL.org, an online Spanish-language legal aid service, which “integrate[s] an automatic translation component into the website’s content management system with Google Translate API,” with translations reviewed and correction by a human “native Spanish-speaker”, by Illinois Legal Aid Online.

Many of these technologies or systems were developed in part with funds from the Legal Services Corporation‘s Technology Initiative Grants (TIG) program.

Malmgren on Legal Information in the Cloud: A Basis for New Services

Staffan Malmgren of the Swedish Courts Administration and the free access to law service of Sweden, lagen.nu, has posted slides from his presentation entitled Legal Information in the Cloud: A Basis for New Services [Rättsinformation i molnet – en grund för nya tjänster?], given 15 November 2011, at Juridiska tjänster via webben - drivkrafter och överväganden, in Stockholm, Sweden.

Here is the abstract:

The presentation outlines the architecture of the official Swedish legal information system and explains choices made in its construction. As proponents of Open data, we want to to enable the construction of a large variety of legal information services using the official information system. We specify a number of features of an information system, and explains how each of these enables a new class of service upon the data.

These features are: Clear rules for reuse, facilities for bulk downloading of data, stable and predictable identifiers for documents and other entities in the system, retrieval of individual documents, standardized document formats, update/notification mechanisms for when data is changed, basic metadata about documents and entities, relational metadata that connect documents and entities, and finally API’s for creating result list of documents and entities matching a set of criteria (including free text search of document text).

These features are ranked in order of how essential they are to implement, and for each new feature we explain the new class of services that the feature enable. E.g. stable and predictable identifiers allow document retrieval by identity, but also value-added information from third parties (e.g. legal commentary for a statute) when everyone agrees on the identifier for a particular information resource.

At the far end, these features enable the construction of legal information services that do not by themselves store any data or implement e.g. free text search or relevance ranking. Data can be retrieved on demand by other services, enabling a legal information cloud service.

For more information, please contact Mr. Malmgren.

Thanks to Mr. Malmgren for sending the abstract.

Agnoloni: Towards a European Legal Data Cloud

Dr. Tommaso Agnoloni of Institute of Legal Information Theory and Techniques (ITTIG/CNR) presented a paper entitled Towards a European Legal Data Cloud, at eChallenges e-2011 Conference, held 26-28 October 2011, in Florence, Italy.

Here is the abstract of the paper:

The Open Data movement has gained momentum during the last year under the impulse of initiatives on government transparency carried on in different countries starting from the U.S. and the U.K. with the publication of the public data portals data.gov and data.gov.uk. Legal information has not much been interested by this phenomenon so far. We argue that the adoption of the linked data principles for publication of legal data, joined with existing efforts of standardization in the identification and representation of legal information, would open the way to a whole range of innovative legal services and applications based on top of a “Legal Data Cloud”. A case study on relevant European legal datasets is presented.

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

A version of this paper has been published as: Tommaso Agnoloni, “Linked Open Data nel dominio giuridico,” Informatica e diritto 2011 (1-2).

Thanks to Dr. Agnoloni for kindly allowing me to post this abstract.

Call for Papers: Special Issue of Informatica e Diritto on Law and Computational Social Science

A call for papers — with submission deadline of 15 January 2012 — has been issued for a special issue of the journal Informatica e Diritto, on the topic: “Law and Computational Social Science” [Diritto e scienze sociali computazionali].

Papers that use or comment on the following methods as applied to law are invited:

• Automatic extraction and analysis of information;
• Social network analysis;
• Complexity theory;
• Computational simulation;
• Geographic / geospatial information systems.

For more information, please see the call for papers.

HT Professor Dr. Enrico Francesconi.

Appleby: Toward Automating Complex Legislation Updates

Paul Appleby of TSO has posted Toward Automating Complex Legislation Updates, on TSO’s OpenUp blog.

In this post, Mr. Appleby describes TSO‘s recent work for the UK National Archives, respecting “updating the system for consolidation of legislation,” which involves Legislation.gov.uk.

For this project, TSO is using its Data Enrichment Service (DES) technology. Mr. Appleby explains that “the DES provides a platform to execute GATE pipelines. A GATE pipeline is a series of processing steps, with each step doing something to the text, with the end result being additional value extracted from the text.”

According to the post, “[i]n addition to returning the changes contained within each item of legislation, the [described] …process also returns the original legislation XML with additional annotations. These additional annotations should then permit enhanced outputs, such as additional links on the legislation.gov.uk website.”

Mr. Appleby’s post provides details about the process, screenshots, and some HTML output.

For more information, please see the complete post.

For more information about the technology underlying Legislation.gov.uk, please see John Sheridan’s VoxPopuLII post entitled Legislation.gov.uk.

Slides from 2011 ITTIG-CNR Workshop: From Information to Knowledge: On Line Access to Legal Information

Slides have been posted for presentations at From Information to Knowledge: On Line Access to Legal Information, a workshop organised by ITTIG-CNR in conjunction with Festival d’Europa 2011, on 6 May 2011, in Florence, Italy.

Full text of revised versions of many of the papers has been published in: Maria Angela Biasiotti and Sebastiano Faro (Eds.), From Information to Knowledge – Online Access to Legal Information: Methodologies, Trends and Perspectives (IOS, 2011).

Here is a list of the papers presented, with links to slides, abstracts, and revised full text where available:

• Giovanni Sartor, European University Institute: Access to legislation in the semantic web (click here for slides; click here for abstract and revised full text);
• Cedric Chailloux, Publications Office of the European Union – EUR-Lex Unit: The new EUR-Lex: improvement and redesign (Click here for slides; click here for abstract and revised full text, by Els Breedstraet);
• Carol Tullo, The National Archives – Information Policy and Services – UK: Online access to UK legislation: strategy and structure (Click here for slides; click here for abstract and revised full text);
• Filippo Donati, University of Florence: Access to legal information in the European Union (Click here for abstract and revised full text);
• G. Boella, L. Humphreys, P. Rossi, and L. van der Torre: Eunomos, a legal document management system based on legislative XML and ontologies (Click here for slides; click here for abstract and revised full text);
• K.E. Petersen: Experiences with “Lex Dania Live” (Click here for slides; click here for abstract and revised full text);
• B. Bassi: Automatic classification of documents for the Library of the Italian Chamber of Deputies (Click here for slides; click here for abstract and revised full text);
• Melih Karakullukçu: Proper treatment of gaps in legal data and in electronic legal research (Click here for abstract and revised full text);
• Marc van Opijnen: European Case-law identifier: a short history and the broad outlook (Click here for slides; click here for abstract and revised full text);
• G. Damele, M. Dogliani., A. Mastropaolo, F. Pallante and D.P. Radicioni: On legal argumentation tecniques: towards a systematic approach (Click here for slides; click here for abstract and revised full text.);
• D. Bourcier and M. Fernández-Barrera: Challenges regarding legal metadata. IP licensing and management of different cognitive levels in the Web 2.0 (Click here for slides; click here for abstract and revised full text);
• G. Peruginelli, D. Tiscornia, G. Greenleaf, A. Mowbray and P. Chung: A comprehensive free access legal information system for Europe (Click here for slides; click here for abstract and revised full text);
• R. Caso, P. Guarda and V. Moscon: Open Access to legal scholarship and Open Archives: towards a better future? (Click here for slides; click here for abstract and revised full text).

New on VoxPopuLII: McDonald on Law in the Last-Mile: The Potential of Mobile Integration into Legal Services

Sean Martin McDonald, JD, MA, of FrontlineSMS and FrontlineSMS:Legal has posted Law in the Last-Mile: The Potential of Mobile Integration into Legal Services, on the VoxPopuLII blog, published by the Legal Information Institute at Cornell University Law School.

In this post, Mr. McDonald describes the obstacles preventing many people in developing countries from accessing legal services. He then argues that new technologies, based on text messaging via mobile phones, can overcome many of these obstacles and substantially improve access to justice for low-income persons. He describes one such technology, FrontlineSMS:Legal, which uses text messaging to improve legal client intake and referral, client and case management, and caseload allocation functions for organizations offering legal services to individuals in developing nations.

This post should be of interest to the access-to-justice community, the information and communication technology for development (ICT4D) community, developers of mobile technology, and the legal technology community.

Fernández-Barrera on User-Generated Knowledge Through Legal Ontologies

Dr. Meritxell Fernández-Barrera of Cersa (Centre d’Études et de Recherches de Sciences Administratives et Politiques)- CNRS has successfully defended her Ph.D. thesis, entitled User-generated knowledge through legal ontologies: how to bring the law into the Semantic Web 2.0, at the European University Institute Department of Law, under the supervision of Professor Dr. Giovanni Sartor of Università di Bologna CIRSFID.

Here is the abstract:

This thesis presents a study of the epistemological and cognitive assumptions which currently underlie knowledge acquisition for legal ontology engineering. The hypothesis is that such assumptions might have a qualitative effect on the final ontological-terminological resources and therefore on the performance of the systems which use them.The first part of the thesis presents the state of the art in legal ontology engineering (the computational concept of ontology, a review of available legal ontologies and modelling methodologies). The second part of the thesis shows that currently knowledge acquisition in legal ontology learning is limited to very concrete legal genres, namely, legislation, case law and legal doctrine. The third part presents a case study in which two different legal genres are used for building a consumer law ontology: a traditional legal genre, Italian consumer regulation, and a Web 2.0 genre, namely an online corpus of citizens‟ queries regarding consumer justice. Results proof the impact of legal genre variation on the construction of the domain ontology. Thus main findings suggest that Web 2.0 corpora are a rich source for the construction of ontological resources, and at the same time these new types of ontological resources might be useful in e-government applications aimed at increasing online communication with citizens.

Some parts of the thesis are summarized in Dr. Fernández-Barrera’s recent VoxPopuLII post, entitled Legal Prosumers: How Can Government Leverage User-Generated Content?

For the full text of the thesis, please contact Dr. Fernández-Barrera.