Bruce Reports on LVI 2012 Workshop on Open Scientific Publishing and Communication on Law and ICT

A Workshop on Open Scientific Publishing and Communication on Law and ICT was held 10 October 2012 in Ithaca, New York, immediately following LVI 2012: The Law via the Internet Conference, held 7-9 October 2012, at the Legal Information Institute (LII), Cornell Law School, Ithaca, New York, USA. The workshop had the informal title of “Steve the Librarian.” Tom Bruce of the LII sends the following report on the workshop. Thanks to Tom for allowing me to repost his report:

Since I ended up acting as the informal “chair” of the meeting, I suppose I should be the one to fill everyone in. It was, in fact, a meeting of 8 or 10 people around a breakfast table at the Holiday Inn, and not a workshop in any ordinary sense. But it was the latest event in a chain of discussions around this subject that began at LVI in Florence, and continued through the LVI meetings in Durban and Hong Kong, sometimes in conference sessions, sometimes in the FALM business meetings, and sometimes in airport lounges. It is fair to say that this is a recurring topic and an important one.

We outlined three major needs in the field.

One (which I’ve pushed to the point of being a broken record on the subject) is the need for low-threshold, internal communication among the various subdisciplines that touch open access to law. We’ve taken on some of that in VoxPopulii, first under your capable leadership and now with Stephanie Davidson and Christine Kirchberger at the helm. It’s vitally necessary that legal informatics researchers learn about the needs of publishers, publishers about librarians, librarians about informatics, and social scientists about all of them (not a complete census but you see what I mean) and that the resulting literature be accessible to non-specialists in the field that is talking about itself. There is room for much more than VoxPopuLii here.

A second is for a publishing venue for people who are working on open access to legal information as researchers in various fields, particularly younger scholars. If you can agree for a moment that we might describe their fields as, for the most part, “law and…” fields, then the journals they now have available to them are all in the fields that are on the other side of the three dots. This has a distorting effect. The availability of very good open-journal software for electronic publication makes good alternatives possible. There is general agreement that because there are so many fields bordering what we all do there is a potentially difficult problem of defining boundaries for such a journal. Initial forays will thus focus pretty tightly on open access to law. Even that is potentially tricky, given that government information of many kinds might be eligible and useful, so firm editorial leadership is called for.

A third is for a comprehensive archive and index to existing work in the field, to be maintained as new stuff is added. One might describe its boundaries as being “all the stuff Rob Richards posts about” , with substantial work on mapping it having been done by you both in formal bibliographies and in blog posts and Twitter. We think there is the possibility of working either with an existing apparatus such as the physics arXiv, or with a purpose-built DSpace installation or some other repository.

Participants in the discussion included Pompeu Casanovas, Graham Greenleaf, Enrico Francesconi, Ginevra Peruginelli, James Lambert, John Heywood, Cicely Wilson, John Joergensen, Amy Taylor, and others whose names I apologize for not retrieving from my faulty memory.

Various individuals have been tasked with pursuing initial steps toward these objectives with the aim of having all or part in place by the time of the next LVI conference (tentatively believed to be in September 2013). We’ll post news as things become concrete.

Archived Tweets and Resources from LVI 2012: Law via the Internet Conference

Click here for archived Twitter tweets, in .csv format, from LVI 2012: Law via the Internet Conference, held 7-9 October 2012 at the Legal Information Institute, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York, USA.

Click here for the conference Website.

The Twitter hashtag for the conference is #lvi2012, and the Twitter account for the conference is @LVI2012.

Click here for the conference program and abstracts of presentations.

Some conference sessions will be livestreamed here.

For blog posts and other resources related to the conference, please see the comments to this post.

Resources for SubTech 2012: International Conference on Substantive Technology in Legal Education and Practice

Here are resources related to SubTech 2012: International Conference on Substantive Technology in Legal Education and Practice, being held 26-28 July 2012 at New York Law School, in New York, New York, USA.

Click here for the conference Website.

Click here for the conference program.

The Twitter hashtag for the conference is #subtech2012.

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

Click here for a livestream of tweets from the conference (HT @reneeknake).

Here are posts and other resources related to the conference:

• Stephanie Kimbro: Review of SubTech2012 at New York Law School in Tweets

Resources About LawTechCamp London 2012

This post lists selected resources related to LawTechCamp London 2012 — “a BarCamp-style community UnConference for new media and technology enthusiasts and legal professionals” — held 29 June 2012 in London, England, UK.

Click here for the conference program.

Here is Twitter-related information about the event:

• The Twitter hashtag for the conference is #lawtechcamplondon.
• For archived Twitter tweets, in .csv format: click here for tweets dated 28-29 June 2012; click here for tweets dated 30 June-4 July 2012.
• For Ann Priestley’s graphs of tweeters and tweet volume, click here.
• For Ann Priestley’s TAGSExplorer network graph of tweeters, click here.
• LegalAware: my #lawtechcamplondon cloud.

Here are posts and other resources about the event that I’ve been able to identify [please mention others in the comments]:

• Ajaz Ahmed’s presentation described in Legal Futures: Freeserve founder says it will take non-lawyers to bring innovation to “hated” legal market.
• Paul Bernal: Privacy Is Not the Enemy….
• Josh Blackman: Josh Blackman Presents at LawTechCamp London 2012 – Assisted Decision Making.
• Michael Bossone: PUSH: A Spoken Word Poem about Law, Technology, and Fear.
• Chris Dale: Moving on the discussion and ways of presentation at Lawtech Camp London.
• Michele DeStefano: Virtual Third Places: Making Room in the Law Market.
• John Flood: LawTechCamp London 2012.
• Joanna Goodman: Unconference! Beat poetry and quantitative analysis – we are all futurists now! (HT Brian Inkster)
• Monica Goyal: Challenges of Late Adoption.
• Monica Goyal: LawTechCamp London.
• Jon Harman: Reflections, Pushing and #LawTechCampLondon.
• Brian Inkster at The Time Blawg: LawTech Camp London 2012: In Tweets.
• Brian Inkster at The Time Blawg: LawTech Camp London 2012 Reviewed: Time to Push.
• Renee Newman Knake: Innovation in the Delivery of Legal Services.
• Renee Newman Knake: Recap of LawTechCamp London - renamed ReInvent Law London 2013.
• Renee Newman Knake: Technology and Untapped Markets in Law, a Pecha Kucha talk for LawTechCamp London.
• Marc Lauritsen: Ontologies and Openness in Law Practice Automation.
• LawSync: Law Tech Camp London 2012.
• Legal 2.0: Stuff I might have said at LawTechCamp London.
• Legal Aware: John Flood chairs a debate on the impact of the Cloud on law and legal education #LawTechCampLondon 2012.
• Legal Aware: #LawTechCampLondon 2012 : where law confronted innovation.
• LegalAware: my #lawtechcamplondon cloud.
• Paul Maharg: LawTechCamp, London (HT Ann Priestley).
• Tom McGinn at VirtualCourthouse: LawTechCampLondon 2012 (HT Brian Inkster).
• Alastair Moyes writing in Law Society Gazette: Challenging the speed of change (HT Brian Inkster).
• Richard Parnham: A tale of two conferences (HT Brian Inkster).
• Ann Priestley: #lawtechcamplondon 1: disruptive innovation?
• Ann Priestley: #lawtechcamplondon: data and disruption.
• Ann Priestley: #lawtechcamplondon: reinventing the law conference.
• Real Business Intelligence: Kicking the Machine.
• Neil Rose at Legal Futures: The next big thing.
• John Sheridan and The National Archives: Experts to contribute to world-leading legislation website.
• Solicitors Journal: Lawyers told to invest in ‘great ideas, not spreadsheets’ (HT Brian Inkster).
• Valentino Spataro has created a #lawtechcamplondon group on the Gloxa platform.
• Richard Susskind’s keynote address described by Legal Futures: “More for less”, liberalisation and technology: Susskind lays out vision of the future.
• Adam Wyner: 21st Century Law Practice and Law Tech Camp Presentations (HT Ann Priestley).

A notable characteristic of this event is that it gathers together in one place individuals from most of the different subgroups of the legal informatics community.

The event’s organizers include:

• Daniel Martin Katz, Michigan State University College of Law
• Renee Newman Knake, Michigan State University College of Law
• Monica Goyal, owner and CEO of MyLegalBriefcase.com
• Lisa Webley, University of Westminster Law School
• John Flood, University of Westminster Law School
• David Allison, The College of Law
• Jon Harman, The College of Law 

HT @reneeknake.

Abstracts of Papers at LLPP 2012: International Conference on Law, Language and Professional Practice

Abstracts have been posted for papers presented at LLPP 2012: The 2nd International Conference on Law, Language, and Professional Practice, held 10-12 May 2012, in Santa Maria Capua Vetere, Caserta, Italy.

Juliette Scott has posted reports on the conference here and here.

For full text of papers, please contact the authors.

Posts and Resources About International Legislation Unhackathon

Here are links to posts and other resources (that I’ve been able to identify) about the International Legislation Unhackathon, held 19 May 2012. (If you know of other posts or resources about the event, please tell us about them in the comments):

• Archived tweets from the event, in .csv format (see other tweets about the event at hashtag #legalhacks)
• U.S. state legislation marked up during the event (click on a shaded state to see legislation from that state)
• National legislation marked up during the event (click on a shaded country to see legislation from that country)
• An overview of the event, and comments contributed during the event, available on the event’s Wiki
• Grant Vergottini’s summary post about the event, entitled Unhackathon Wrapup
• Ari Hershowitz’s summary post about the event, entitled International Legislative Unhackathon and G+ Hangout
• Videos shown during the event
• Grant Vergottini’s new HTML-based XML legislation editor, used during the event
• Grant Vergottini’s posts about the event (written before the event)
• Ari Hershowitz’s posts about the event (written before the event: here and here)
• Alex Hendler’s post looking forward to the event, entitled How to Eat Legislative Sausage
• Background information about the event

Click here for upcoming legal hacking events.

Find news about upcoming legal hacking events at hashtags #legalhack and #legalhacks.

Click here for posts and resources about other legal hacking events held recently.

Palmirani on LegalDocML @ International Workshop: Identifying Benefits Deriving from the Adoption of XML-based Chains for Drafting Legislation

Professor Dr. Monica Palmirani of Università di Bologna Dipartimento di Scienze Giuridiche «Antonio Cicu» and CIRSFID sends us the following post:

LegalDocML was announced and presented on May 3rd and 4th at Brussels, at the International Workshop “Identifying benefits deriving from the adoption of XML-based chains for drafting legislation”. The initiative was organized by the European Parliament’s Office for Promotion of Parliamentary Democracy, in association with the UN/IPU’s Global Center for ICT in Parliament. The LegalDocML chairs (Palmirani and Vitali) presented the benefits of the application of Akoma Ntoso to the legislative drafting process. The secretaries of LegalDocML TC Ashok Hariharan (UN/DESA) and Claudio Fabiani (EU Parliament) presented two tools (Bungeni-Editor and AT4AM) for the legislative workflow, both based on Akoma Ntoso.

Posts and Videos on Legal Hacking Events

Several posts and videos have been published about the legal hacking events — the Brooklyn Law School Legal Hackathon (held 15 April 2012); the Georgetown Law Center Iron Tech Lawyer Competition, held 18 April 2012; and the International Legislation Unhackathon (held 19 May 2012) — that have taken place in recent weeks (If you know of others, please mention them in the comments):

Here are videos and posts about/from the Brooklyn Law School Legal Hackathon:

• Videos from the Brooklyn Law School Legal Hackathon [on YouTube]
• Videos from the Hackathon [on ustream]
• Nick Allard at BLIP Legal Hackathon
• Bianca Bosker, Legal Hackathon Challenges Lawyers To Think Like Hackers
• David Canton, Legal Hackathon
• Tim Hwang, Horses to Water [slides]
• Lea Rosen, Hack the Law
• sethopia, Hacking the Law [on Slashdot]
• Phil Weiss, Reflections on a Legal Hackathon

Here are posts and videos about the the Georgetown Law Center Iron Tech Lawyer Competition:

• Ron Friedmann, Iron Tech Lawyer Competition at Georgetown Law School
• Nightly Business Report story on the Georgetown Law Center Iron Tech Lawyer Competition
• Greg Lambert, The Next Generation of Computers Practicing Law

For posts and resources about the International Legislation Unhackathon, held 19 May 2012, click here.

For post and resources about the Open Legislation Hackathon 2012, held 2 June 2012 in Victoria, BC, click here.

Legal hacking is a movement. On Twitter, the hashtags for legal hacking news are #legalhack and #legalhacks. Click here for upcoming legal hacking events.

Wyner on Workshop on FP7 eGovernance and Policy Modelling Projects

Dr. Adam Wyner of the University of Leeds Centre for Digital Citizenship has posted Note on Workshop on FP7 eGovernance and Policy Modelling Projects, on his blog, Language Logic Law Software.

The EU-funded Project IMPACT : Integrated Method for Policy Making Using Argument Modelling and Computer Assisted Text Analysis, was featured at the Workshop. Click here for more information about Project IMPACT.

Here is introductory information about the post:

On January 27th, 2012, I attended a workshop in Sheffield, United Kingdom on current FP7 eGovernance and Policy Modelling projects. This was an opportunity to hear from and meet participants in other projects, largely based in the United Kingdom. The information (somewhat augmented) about the workshop is below. My colleagues in the IMPACT Project, Professor Ann Macintosh and Neil Benn, presented our side of the story.

Aims

• To close the gap between the availability of cutting edge R & D in eGovernance and Policy Modelling and its take-up in local and central government. It will bring the new governance projects and those about to exploit their results into a collaborative environment.
• To link the projects currently creating the best practice of the future with initiatives seeking to share current best practice, thus assisting with “exploitation” of the new initiatives.
• To briefly assess how these initiatives may be of global benefit by examining how China may be encouraged to take a short cut to sustainable development and looking at joint approaches to China.

For more information, please see the complete post.

Kirchberger on the VQ Legal Knowledge and Strategy Forum 2011

Christine Kirchberger, Esq., LL.M., M.L.I.T., junior lecturer and doctoral candidate at Stockholm University Department of Law‘s Swedish Law and Informatics Research Institute (IRI), has posted a summary of, and comments on, the 2011 VQ Legal Knowledge and Strategy Forum, held 4 October 2011 in Stockholm, Sweden.

The summary discusses Richard Susskind’s presentation on the role of technology in the development of legal services. The summary also describes panel discussions and presentations on changes in legal knowledge management, new legal services business models, the role of social media in the law firm context, law firms’ use of business data, notable law practice software, and new mobile apps by Swedish legal information providers.

Ms. Kirchberger invites readers to send her additional “examples of Swedish online legal services or legal cloud services.”

HT @iinek.