Haapio & Passera: Visual Law: What Lawyers Need to Learn from Information Designers

Helena Haapio, LL.M., of Lexpert Ltd., and Stefania Passera, M.A., of Aalto University School of Science, have posted Visual Law: What Lawyers Need to Learn from Information Designers, at VoxPopuLII.

The post gives several interesting examples of visualization of legal information, including:

• Candy Chang’s Vendor Power!
• Susanne Hoogwater’s Legal Visuals
• Olivia Zarcate’s Imagidroit
• Dr. Margaret Hagan’s Open Law Lab, and
• Professor Seth Chandler’s Visualizing Legal Rules: Battle of the Forms.

The authors then conclude:

Once the visual turn has begun, we do not think it can be stopped; the benefits are just too many. As lawyers, we have a lot to learn and we could do our job better in so many respects if we indeed started to get into the mode of thinking and acting like a designer and not just like a lawyer. This applies not only to purely legal information, but everything else we produce: contracts, memos, corporate governance materials, policies, manuals, employee handbooks, and guidance.

Legal information tends to be complex, and information design(ers) can help us make it easier to understand and act upon. The goal is accomplishing the writer’s goals by meeting the readers’ needs. [...]

With new tools and services being developed, it will become easier to convey our content and documents in more usable and more engaging ways. As the work progresses and new tools and apps appear, we are likely to see a major change in the legal industry. Meanwhile, let us know your views and ideas and what you are doing or interested in doing with visuals.

For more details, please see the complete post.

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.

Kraft and Jaquith: Launch of Maryland Decoded

Seamus Kraft and Waldo Jaquith tell us about the launch of Maryland Decoded, a new free-access-to-law site for the U.S. state of Maryland, built by Seamus and colleagues at the OpenGov Foundation, on Waldo’s State Decoded platform.

Here is a description, from the Maryland Decoded “About” page:

Maryland Decoded is a non-profit, non-governmental, non-partisan implementation of The State Decoded brought to you by the folks at the OpenGov Foundation. The State Decoded is a free, open source project that provides a platform to display state-level legal information in a friendly, accessible, modern fashion. Maryland is the third state to deploy the software, with more coming soon.[...]

For more details, please see Waldo’s post, OpenGov Foundation’s post, or the Maryland Decoded site.

HT @waldojaquith

Mill on Scout, Free Access to Law, and Open Legal Data

Eric Mill of the Sunlight Foundation has posted the text of his presentation on tracking government information and open legal data, given 26 April 2013 at the AzALL Congressional Information Symposium, in Phoenix, Arizona, USA.

Here is the introduction to the presentation:

I recently got a chance to go speak to a group of Arizona law librarians about legal informatics [...]

They found me because of Scout, and asked me to talk about tracking government information. I decided to start with Scout as an example, to zoom out to similar projects [GovTrack and CourtListener] , and then to describe the conditions necessary to make projects like ours possible. Because the audience was law librarians, a sympathetic crowd inside an unsympathetic area of government, I emphasized the necessity of absolutely free access to data as a fundamental requirement and right. [...]

For more details, please see the complete post.

HT @konklone

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

CODR 2013: Conference on Online Dispute Resolution: Tweets and Resources

This post links to resources related to CODR 2013: Conference on Online Dispute Resolution, held 19 April 2013 at Stanford Law School.

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

The Twitter hashtag for the conference was #CODR2013

Some papers from the conference are available at http://blogs.law.stanford.edu/codr2013/papers/

Here is the conference agenda (from here):

Panel 1: The Impact of ODR on the Practice of Law

Ron Dolin, Lecturer in Law, Stanford Law School: “Impact of ODR on Small Claims”

Richard S. Granat, Director, Center for Law Practice Technology and CEO/Founder, LawMediaLabs, Inc.: “Software-Assisted Online Divorce Mediation”

Ayelet Sela, JSD Candidate, Stanford Law School: “ODR System Design: Lessons from Research and Practice”

Panel 2: The Technology of ODR

James Ring, CEO, Fair Outcomes, Inc.: “Using Online Commitment Mechanisms to Manage and Resolve Legal Claims“

Loic Coutelier, Director of Arbitration and Product Manager, Modria.com: “Three Practical Applications of ODR Innovations”

Jin Ho Verdonschot, Justice Sector Advisor, The Netherlands: “The Future of Courts: A New Procedure for Neighbor Disputes in the Netherlands”

Moderator: Roland Vogl, Lecturer in Law and Executive Director, Stanford Program in Law, Science and Technology

Panel 3: ODR in the International Arena

Colin Rule, CEO, Modria.com: “Online Dispute Resolution and Internet Justice“

Vikki M. Rogers, Director, Institute of International Commercial Law, Pace Law School: “Managing Disputes in the Online Global Marketplace: Reviewing the Progress of UNCITRAL’s Working Group III on ODR“

Amy J. Schmitz, Professor of Law, University of Colorado School of Law: “ODR to Address American Exceptionalism in Arbitration“

Moderator: Janet Martinez, Senior Lecturer in Law and Director, Gould Negotiation & Mediation Program, Stanford Law School

For videos of this conference, please see the comments to this post.

Georgetown Iron Tech Lawyer Competition 2013: Tweets and Resources

This post contains links to tweets and other resources from the 2013 Georgetown Iron Tech Lawyer Competition: Access to Justice Edition, held 17 April 2013 at Georgetown University Law Center in Washington, DC, USA.

Click here for the event’s Webpage.

The event was organized by Professor Tanina Rostain and Adjunct Professor Roger V. Skalbeck, both of Georgetown University Law Center, as part of their practicum entitled Technology, Innovation and Legal Practice Practicum – Access to Justice.

Here is a description of the event, from the event Website:

Students in the [practicum] have heard from a range of experts on topics relating to law practice innovation enabled by technology. Students work in small teams for a legal service organization to develop a platform, application or automated system that increases access to justice and/or improves the effectiveness of legal representation. These organizations include civil rights organizations, direct service providers and government agencies. The students will be presenting their final projects in Georgetown Law’s “Iron Tech Lawyer Competition.” A panel of judges, made up of two Georgetown Law faculty members and two outside experts, will decide which is the best platform, program or expert system designed in the class.

The Twitter hashtag for the event was #IronTechLawyer

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

Video of the event will soon be available here, according to a notice on that page.

Neota Logic, a sponsor of the event, wrote a preliminary post about the event entitled less than one month until iron tech lawyer competition at georgetown law center.

For additional resources about the event, please see the comments to this post.

Click here for information about the 2012 Georgetown Iron Tech Lawyer Competition.

Scherer et al.: Bridging narrative scenario texts and formal policy modeling through conceptual policy modeling

Sabrina Scherer, Professor Dr. Maria A. Wimmer, and Suvad Markisic, all of the University of Koblenz-Landau Institute for IS Research, have published Bridging narrative scenario texts and formal policy modeling through conceptual policy modeling, forthcoming in Artificial Intelligence and Law.

Here is the abstract:

Engaging stakeholders in policy making and supporting policy development with advanced information and communication technologies including policy simulation is currently high on the agenda of research. In order to involve stakeholders in providing their input to policy modeling via online means, simple techniques need to be employed such as scenario technique. Scenarios enable stakeholders to express their views in narrative text. At the other end of policy development, a frequently used approach to policy modeling is agent-based simulation. So far, effective support to transform narrative text input to formal simulation statements is not widely available. In this paper, we present a novel approach to support the transformation of narrative texts via conceptual modeling into formal simulation models. The approach also stores provenance information which is conveyed via annotations of texts to the conceptual model and further on to the simulation model. This way, traceability of information is provided, which contributes to better understanding and transparency, and therewith enables stakeholders and policy modelers to return to the sources that informed the conceptual and simulation model. In this paper, we present the consistent conceptual description (CCD) as conceptual modeling approach to bridge the gap between narrative texts and formal policy models. The CCD meta-model with the underlying vocabulary for describing policy contexts is detailed. A case study introduces the application of the approach in the Open Collaboration for Policy Modeling project.

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

Supreme Court Mapping Project @ University of Baltimore

Professor Colin Starger of the University of Baltimore School of Law tells us of The Supreme Court Mapping Project.

Here are excerpts of the description:

The SCOTUS Mapping Project has two distinct components:

Enhanced development of the Mapper software. This software enables users to create sophisticated interactive maps of Supreme Court doctrine by plotting relationships between majority, concurring and dissenting opinions. With the software, users can both visualize how different “lines” of Supreme Court opinions have evolved, and employ animation to make interactive presentations for audiences.

Building an extensive library of Supreme Court doctrinal maps. By highlighting the relationships between essential and influential Court opinions, these maps promote efficient learning and understanding of key doctrinal debates and can assist students, scholars, and practitioners alike. The library already includes maps of key regions of doctrine surrounding the Due Process Clause, the Commerce Clause, and the Fourth Amendment.

For more details, please see the project’s Website.

For examples of the output of the project, please see the papers linked in the post, Starger: Mapping Arguments in the U.S. Health Care Case.