May 8-11: ABA/NLADA Equal Justice Conference

Legal technology to enable access to justice is one of the main topics at ABA / NLADA Equal Justice Conference 2013, being held 8-11 May 2013 in St. Louis, Missouri, USA.

Click here for the conference program.

The Twitter hashtag for the conference appears to be #ejcstl

HT @wljones99

Macfarlane: Empirical Study of the Needs of Self-Represented Litigants in Canada

Professor Dr. Julie Macfarlane of the University of Windsor has published The National Self-Represented Litigants Project: Identifying and Meeting the Needs of Self-Represented Litigants: Final Report (2013).

The report states the findings of an empirical study of the needs of pro se litigants in courts in Alberta, British Columbia, and Ontario.

Findings are based on one-on-one or focus-group interviews with “259 self-represented litigants” (SRLs) and 107 legal service providers.

Although the sample is not a probability sample, “the characteristics of the SRL sample are broadly representative of the general Canadian population.”

The principal findings regarding information are as follows (I’ve added bulleted lists for ease of reading):

Regarding court forms:

The most common complaints include:

• difficulty knowing which form(s) to use;
• apparently inconsistent information from court staff/judges;
• difficulty with the language used on forms; and
• the consequences of mistakes including adjournments and more wasted time and stress.

Regarding online legal resources:

[SRLs] identified the following weaknesses:

• an emphasis on substantive legal information and an absence of information on practical tasks like:
• filing or serving,
• advice on negotiation or a strategy for talking to the other side,
• presentation techniques, or [...]
• legal procedure;
• [online legal resources] often directed them to other sites (sometimes with broken links) with inconsistent information; and
• multiplicity of sites with no means of differentiating which is the most “legitimate”.

Cynthia Eagan [a member of the research team] found many of the same problems when she audited a selection of on-line Court Guides [... as well as problems concerning:]

• the reading levels of some of this material (as high as 13.5), and
• the heavy use of jargon and unexplained legal terms.

Regarding legal information for SRLs:

• SRL’s in the study frequently described themselves as seeking “guidance” rather than “direction”.
• The most common source of legal information for SRL’s are court staff [...]
• [SRLs] complained about the restrictions on the time and scope of information that these staff can offer, because of:
• the limitation on their providing “legal advice”[...] or [...]
• the sheer volume of people they are dealing with.
• The distinction between legal information/legal advice which lies at the heart of the job descriptions of staff working on the court counters and in information services is consistently complained about by both SRL’s and staff, as at best unclear and at worst practically unworkable [...]

Regarding access to legal services:

[...] many SRL’s sought some type of “unbundled” legal services from legal counsel; for example:

• assistance with document review,
• writing a letter, or
• appearing in court [...]

For the recommendations and additional information, please see the complete report and the project’s Website.

Funding for the project was provided by the Law Foundation of Ontario, the Alberta Law Foundation, and the Law Foundation of British Columbia/Legal Services Society of British Columbia.

Please see the comments to this post for events and other information related to the report.

Updated as of May 2013: Legal Informatics Conference Calendar

The legal informatics conference calendar has now been updated.

The calendar lists primarily scholarly conferences that focus on legal information systems, legal communication, legal/forensic linguistics, or egovernment (as applied to legal information), or that are known to welcome papers on those topics. The calendar also lists legal hackathons and other legal hacking events.

Click here for a list of events just added to the calendar.

If you know of events or other information that should be on the calendar but are not; or if you spot errors in the calendar, I’d be grateful if you would please share that information in the comments to this post.

Legal Informatics Proposals for TransparencyCamp 2013

Some legal informatics proposals have been submitted for TransparencyCamp 2013, to be held 4-5 May 2013, in Washington, DC, USA:

• Ben Balter: Open Sourcing Government
• Hudson Hollister: Creating a Legislative Agenda for Open Data
• Tom MacWright: The Story of the DC Code
• James McKinney: Open Government Data Standards
• David Moore: OpenGovernment.org : For state and city government engagement
• Stephen Schultze: PACER, RECAP, OpenPACER.org

The Twitter hashtag for TransparencyCamp 2013 appears to be #tcamp13

Parliaments on the Net XI Conference: 2-3 May 2013: Tweets and resources

The Parliaments on the Net XI Conference is being held 2-3 May 2013 in London, England, UK.

Click here for archived videos of the Day 1 and Day 2 sessions.

The conference is being live-blogged at http://potn2013.tumblr.com/

The Twitter hashtag for the conference is #potn2013

Click here for archived Twitter tweets from both days of the conference.

Click here for the conference program.

Calls for papers still open: ICAIL 2013 Workshops

Calls for papers remain open for the following workshops being held 10/14 June 2013 at ICAIL 2013: International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Law in Rome, Italy:

W2 — Argumentation in AI and Law: what do we know and where should we go?

• Chair: Trevor Bench-Capon
• Call-for-Papers Submission Deadline: 29 April 2013
• Workshop Date: 10 June 2013

W3 — Legal Open Data: from Institutions to Crowd-sourcing

• Chair: Monica Palmirani
• Call-for-Papers Submission Deadline: 4 May 2013
• Workshop Date: 10 June 2013

W4 — 13th International Workshop on Computational Models of Natural Argument (CMNA XIII)

• Chairs: Floriana Grasso, Chris Reed
• Call-for-Papers Submission Deadline: Short papers: 30 April 2013
• Workshop Date: 14 June 2013

W7 — Discovery of Electronically Stored Information Workshop (DESI V)

• Chairs: Jason Baron
• Call-for-Papers Submission Deadline: Research papers: 1 May 2013; Position papers: 8 May 2013
• Workshop Date: 14 June 2013

W9 — Network analysis in legal sources

• Chair: Radboud Winkels
• Call-for-Papers Submission Deadline: 10 May 2013
• Workshop Date: 14 June 2013

Click here for a complete list of ICAIL 2013 workshops and tutorials.

April 26: CodeX FutureLaw 2013 Conference: Tweets and Resources

The CodeX FutureLaw 2013 Conference is being held 26 April 2013 at Stanford Law School, Stanford, California, USA.

The conference focuses ‘on how technology is changing the landscape of the legal profession and the law more broadly. The conference will bring together leading thinkers, entrepreneurs, investors and technologists that are experimenting and actively working to re-architect the future of the law. If you’re of a similar mind, we’d love to have you there.’

Click here for the conference program.

The Twitter hashtag for the conference is #futurelaw

Click here for archived Twitter tweets from the conference, in .csv format.

The conference Chair was Tim Hwang.

The legal informatics-oriented panels at the conference include:

• Legal Disruption: Why Now? Why Here? What Next?
• Computational Law and Contracts
• Designing Legal Data
• Open Source Legal Practice

Professor Dr. Daniel Martin Katz of Michigan State University and the ReInventLaw Lab will give the closing keynote address.

The conference is sponsored by CodeX: The Stanford Center for Legal Informatics.

Please see the comments to this post for additional resources related to the conference.

Proposals invited for lawTechCamp 2013

Proposals for sessions are invited for lawTechCamp 2013, “a BarCamp-style community UnConference for new media and technology enthusiasts and legal professionals,” to be held 8 June 2013 in Toronto, Canada.

lawTechCamp 2013 is being organized by Monica Goyal of MyLegalBriefcase, Mitch Kowalski, and Sapna Mahboobani of Sapna Law Professional Corporation.

Here are details on the session proposals:

LawTechCamp is all about you, the participants. We want the participants, to dictate what sessions are covered at lawTechCamp, and to present them. The only thing to remember is that topics should bridge technology and law in some way. This could mean technology that could help in the practice of law. Or legal issues that affect the development of technology.

Last year, we had a sessions on knowledge management, social media and the law, IP issues, and cloud computing.

If we receive more suggestions then rooms available for the event, we will put the suggestions to a vote. [...]

For more details, please see the event Website.

Click here for information on previous lawTechCamp events.

Calls for Papers: ICAIL 2013 Workshops

Calls for papers have been posted for most of the workshops being held at ICAIL 2013: International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Law.

The workshops will be held on 10/14 June 2013 in Rome, Italy.

Here are submission deadlines and links to workshop calls and Websites:

W1 — Coherence 2013 – Artificial Intelligence, Coherence and Legal Reasoning

• Chair: Michal Araszkiewicz
• Call-for-Papers Submission Deadline: 20 April 2013
• Workshop Date: 10 June 2013

W2 — Argumentation in AI and Law: what do we know and where should we go?

• Chair: Trevor Bench-Capon
• Call-for-Papers Submission Deadline: 29 April 2013
• Workshop Date: 10 June 2013

W3 — Legal Open Data: from Institutions to Crowd-sourcing

• Chair: Monica Palmirani
• Call-for-Papers Submission Deadline: TBA
• Workshop Date: 10 June 2013

W4 — 13th International Workshop on Computational Models of Natural Argument (CMNA XIII)

• Chairs: Floriana Grasso, Chris Reed
• Call-for-Papers Submission Deadline: Long papers: 15 April 2013; Short papers: 30 April 2013
• Workshop Date: 14 June 2013

W5 — SmartData: the New Face of AI, and the Law

• Chairs: Ann Cavoukian, Stefano Nolfi
• Call-for-Papers Submission Deadline: N/A.
• Workshop Date: 14 June 2013

W6 — Workshop on Formal Argument and Evidential Inference

• Chairs: Giovanni Sartor, Scott Brewer, Gustavo Ribeiro
• Call-for-Papers Submission Deadline: Passed
• Workshop Date: 14 June 2013

W7 — Discovery of Electronically Stored Information Workshop (DESI V)

• Chairs: Jason Baron
• Call-for-Papers Submission Deadline: Research papers: 1 May 2013; Position papers: 8 May 2013
• Workshop Date: 14 June 2013

W8 — Cross-border e-justice and e-Codex

• Chair: Marco Fabri
• Call-for-Papers Submission Deadline: N/A.
• Workshop Date: 14 June 2013

W9 — Network analysis in legal sources

• Chair: Radboud Winkels
• Call-for-Papers Submission Deadline: 1 May 2013
• Workshop Date: 14 June 2013

Legal informatics papers at We Robot 2013 Conference

Some legal informatics papers or panels are included in the program for the 2013 We Robot Conference, to be held 8-9 April 2013 at Stanford Law School, in Stanford, California, USA:

Panel: Law as Algorithm
Speakers: Peter Asaro, Lisa Shay, Woodrow Hartzog
Moderator: Harry Surden
Related Papers:
On Implicit and Explicit Legal Requirements for Human Judgment
Do Robots Dream of Electric Laws? An Experiment in Law as Algorithm
[...]

Panel: Designing Values
Speakers: Ergun Calisgan, AJung Moon, Aneta Podsiadla
Moderator: Ian Kerr
Related Papers:
Open Roboethics Pilot: Accelerating Policy Design, Implementation and Demonstration of Socially Acceptable Robot Behaviors
What Robotics Can Learn from the Contemporary Problems of Information Technologies Sector- Compliance and Enforcement of Privacy by Design
[...]

Paper: Programming Robotic Decisions with Potentially Lethal Outcomes: Comparing Self-Driving Cars and Autonomous Weapon Systems, and How They Should Be Regulated as Their Autonomous Capabilities Evolve
Authors: Kenneth Anderson, Matthew Waxman
Commentator: Dan Siciliano (Stanford University Rock Center)

HT @LawandLit