Slides: Legal Informatics Research Today: Implications for Legal Prediction, 3D Printing, and eDiscovery

I’ve posted slides of my presentation entitled Legal Informatics Research Today: Implications for Legal Prediction, 3D Printing, and eDiscovery, given 16 May 2013 at CICL 2013: The Fifth Conference on Innovation and Communications Law, 16 May 2013, Glen Arbor, Michigan, sponsored by Michigan State University College of Law.

Here is the abstract:

This presentation describes methodologies and results of recent legal informatics research on eDiscovery and legal prediction, and describes two possible scenarios for the application of legal technology to 3D printing. In addition, the presentation describes a four-level framework that enables comparison of legal informatics research studies in different areas.

I thank Professor Adam Candeub of Michigan State University College of Law for inviting me to give this presentation.

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.

Lagnado, Fenton, and Neil: Legal idioms: A framework for evidential reasoning

Dr. David A. Lagnado of University College London, and Professor Dr. Norman Fenton and Professor Dr. Martin Neil, both of Queen Mary University of London, have published Legal idioms: A framework for evidential reasoning, Argument & Computation 4(1), 46-63 (2013).

Here is the abstract:

How do people make legal judgments based on complex bodies of interrelated evidence? This paper outlines a novel framework for evidential reasoning using causal idioms. These idioms are based on the qualitative graphical component of Bayesian networks, and are tailored to the legal context. They can be combined and reused to model complex bodies of legal evidence. This approach is applied to witness and alibi testimony, and is illustrated with a real legal case. We show how the framework captures critical aspects of witness reliability, and the potential interrelations between witness reliabilities and other hypotheses and evidence. We report a brief empirical study on the interpretation of alibi evidence, and show that people’s intuitive inferences fit well with the qualitative aspects of the idiom-based framework.

Articles on legal information or decision making in new issue of Journal of Empirical Legal Studies

The new issue of Journal of Empirical Legal Studies (10(2), June 2013) includes several articles on legal information or decision making:

• Doug Williams: Do Racial Preferences Affect Minority Learning in Law Schools?
• Andreas Glöckner and Christoph Engel: Can We Trust Intuitive Jurors? Standards of Proof and the Probative Value of Evidence in Coherence-Based Reasoning
• Christina L. Boyd, David A. Hoffman, Zoran Obradovic and Kosta Ristovski: Building a Taxonomy of Litigation: Clusters of Causes of Action in Federal Complaints
• Ryan C. Black and James F. Spriggs II: The Citation and Depreciation of U.S. Supreme Court Precedent
• William C. Thompson, Suzanne O. Kaasa and Tiamoyo Peterson: Do Jurors Give Appropriate Weight to Forensic Identification Evidence?

HT @aabibliographer

Sprain and Gastil: An Interpretative Account of Jurors’ Expressed Deliberative Rules and Premises

Professor Dr. Leah Sprain of Colorado State University and Professor Dr. John Gastil of Penn State University have published What Does It Mean to Deliberate? An Interpretative Account of Jurors’ Expressed Deliberative Rules and Premises, Communication Quarterly, 61(2), 151-171 (2013).

Here is the abstract:

To advance deliberative theory and practice, this study considers the experiences of trial jurors who engaged in deliberation. Conceptualized as a speech event, this article inductively explores the deliberative rules and premises articulated by jurors. Jurors believe deliberation should be rigorous and democratic, including speaking opportunities for all, open-minded consideration of different views, and respectful listening. Jurors actively consider information, but face-to-face deliberation is essential for thoroughly processing evidence. Although emotions should not influence the final verdict, participants report that emotions often reinforce deliberative norms. These results inform theory and deliberative experiences in and beyond the jury.

Gluck & Schultz Bressman: Statutory Interpretation from the Inside: An Empirical Study of Congressional Drafting

Professor Abbe R. Gluck of Yale Law School and Associate Dean Lisa Schultz Bressman of Vanderbilt Law School have posted Statutory Interpretation from the Inside — An Empirical Study of Congressional Drafting, Delegation and the Canons: Part I, forthcoming in Stanford Law Review.

Here is the abstract:

What role should the realities of the legislative drafting process play in the theories and doctrines of statutory interpretation and administrative law? The ongoing debates frequently turn on empirical assumptions about how Congress drafts and what interpretive rules Congress knows, but there has been almost no testing of whether any of these assumptions reflect legislative reality. We have attempted to fill that void. This is the first of two Articles reporting the results of the most extensive empirical study to date — a survey of 137 congressional counsels drawn from both parties, both chambers of Congress and spanning multiple committees — on topics ranging from drafters’ knowledge and use of the textual and substantive canons of interpretation, to legislative history, the administrative law deference doctrines, the legislative process and the Court-Congress relationship.

Our findings have implications for virtually every swath of the interpretive debates. We can report, for instance, that there are some canons that our drafters know and use — Chevron and the presumption against preemption, for example, but that there are other canons that our drafters know, but consciously reject in favor of political or other considerations, including the presumption in favor of consistent usage, the rule against superfluities, and dictionary use; and still other canons, like Mead and noscitur a sociis, that our drafters do not know as legal rules but that seem to be accurate judicial reflections of how Congress drafts. Our interviews also elicited a treasure trove of information about key influences on the drafting process that legal doctrine rarely considers, from the variety of audiences for legislative history, to the way in which the personal reputation of particular agency heads affects delegation decisions, to the fact that drafting conventions depend on the type of statute being drafted and its path through Congress.

All of these findings, and many others, allow us to press for a more precise answer to one of the field’s foundational questions: that is, what should be the purpose of these canons of interpretation? Judges, often using the unhelpful generalization that they are Congress’s “faithful agents,” have legitimized these doctrines using a variety of conflicting justifications, some of which turn on empirical reality, some of which do not, and most of which aim to justify many different types of canons that seem to be doing very different types of work. Do the canons reflect how Congress actually drafts, and so effectuate legislative supremacy? Or do judges use the canons for more dialogical reasons, such as to encourage Congress to draft more precisely — and does Congress listen? Might the canons, despite how “neutral” some appear, instead be understood to effectuate judicial values that are external to the legislative process — such as advancing constitutional norms or imposing coherence on the U.S. Code? Our study illuminates this variety across the normative bases for the canons also reveals that each set of justifications rests on a very different vision of the judicial power and the Court-Congress relationship.

HT @rickhasen

Shay et al.: Do Robots Dream of Electric Laws? An Experiment in Law as Algorithm

Professor Dr. Lisa Shay of the West Point Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, and colleagues, presented a paper entitled Do Robots Dream of Electric Laws? An Experiment in Law as Algorithm, at We Robot 2013 Conference, held 8-9 April 2013 at Stanford Law School.

Here is the abstract:

Due to recent advances in computerized analysis and robotics, automated law enforcement has become technically feasible. Unfortunately, laws were not created with automated enforcement in mind, and even seemingly simple laws have subtle features that require programmers to make assumptions about how to encode them. We demonstrate this ambiguity with an experiment where a group of 52 programmers was assigned the task of automating the enforcement of traffic speed limits. A late model vehicle was equipped with a sensor that collected actual vehicle speed over an hour long commute. The programmers (without collaboration) each wrote a program that computed the number of speed limit violations and issued mock traffic tickets. Despite quantitative data for both vehicle speed and the speed limit, the number of tickets issued varied from none to one per sensor sample above the speed limit. Our results from the experiment highlight the significant deviation in number and type of citations issued during the course of the commute, based on legal interpretations and assumptions made by programmers untrained in the law. These deviations were mitigated, but not eliminated, in one sub-group that was provided with a legally reviewed software design specification, providing insight into ways to automate the law in the future. Automation of legal reasoning is likely to be the most effective in contexts where legal conclusions are predictable because there is little room for choice in a given model; that is, they are determinable. Yet this experiment demonstrates that even relatively narrow and straightforward “rules” can be problematically indeterminate in practice.

HT @lawyertechrvw

Briscoe, Tsai, and Brivot: How a KM system affects workplace relationships in a corporate law firm

Professor Dr. Forrest Briscoe and Professor Dr. Wenpin Tsai, both of Penn State University Smeal College of Business, and Professor Dr. Marion Brivot of l’Université Laval, will present a paper entitled The Dilemma of technology and relationships: How the introduction of a knowledge management system affects workplace relationships in a corporate law firm, at The Shrinking Pyramid: Implications for Law Practice and the Legal Profession, a conference to be held 13 April 2013, at Georgetown University Law Center, in Washington, DC.

Here is the abstract:

How does the introduction of new information technology in an organization affect workplace relationships and create value? A widely subscribed materialist perspective emphasizes the efficiency of technology use that reduces the reliance on interpersonal relationships in knowledge search. In contrast, a social construction perspective highlights the importance of people and their social interactions in shaping technology. Using client billings and personnel records from before and after the implementation of a knowledge management system (KMS) in a large law firm, we examine the effect of KMS use on the formation of new workplace ties and the creation of value. We find evidence that individuals enact the machine view: after downloading a distant person’s knowledge, the focal person becomes less likely to form a tie to her. Yet this behavior does not seem to create value; indeed, downloading distant people’s knowledge is also associated with a reduction in subsequent value creation. The latter finding appears more consistent with the socialized view, as do other findings that pre-existing social capital remains the best predictor of new tie formation, and pre-existing social capital also provides the best basis for using the KMS to create value. We relate these effects to overall changes observed after KMS implementation, and consider the implications for research on technology use and social capital in organizations.

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

Thanks to Professor Briscoe for allowing me to post the abstract.

Fornaciari and Poesio on Automatic deception detection in Italian court cases

Tommaso Fornaciari of the University of Trento, and Professor Dr. Massimo Poesio of the University of Essex, have published Automatic deception detection in Italian court cases, forthcoming in Artificial Intelligence and Law.

Here is the abstract:

Effective methods for evaluating the reliability of statements issued by witnesses and defendants in hearings would be an extremely valuable support to decision-making in court and other legal settings. In recent years, methods relying on stylometric techniques have proven most successful for this task; but few such methods have been tested with language collected in real-life situations of high-stakes deception, and therefore their usefulness outside lab conditions still has to be properly assessed. In this study we report the results obtained by using stylometric techniques to identify deceptive statements in a corpus of hearings collected in Italian courts. The defendants at these hearings were condemned for calumny or false testimony, so the falsity of (some of) their statements is fairly certain. In our experiments we replicated the methods used in previous studies but never before applied to high-stakes data, and tested new methods. We also considered the effect of a number of variables including in particular the homogeneity of the dataset. Our results suggest that accuracy at deception detection clearly above chance level can be obtained with real-life data as well.

Cotropia & Petherbridge: The Dominance of Teams in the Production of Legal Knowledge

Professor Christopher A. Cotropia of University of Richmond School of Law and Professor Dr. Lee Petherbridge of Loyola Law School of Los Angeles have posted a working paper entitled The Dominance of Teams in the Production of Legal Knowledge, on SSRN.

Here is the abstract:

Using a database that contains over 19,000 law review articles published in top 100 law reviews between 1990 and 2010, we demonstrate that team authors dominate solo authors in the production of legal knowledge. Team research is on average more frequently cited than individual research, and teams are more likely than individuals to produce exceptionally high impact research. These results suggest that a legal research culture that encourages cooperativity and collaboration could foster an intellectual connectedness helpful to improving the quality of knowledge production by legal academics.