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.

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

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.

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.

Several Articles on Legal Educational Technology (Papers from BILETA 2012) in New Issue of EJLT

The new issue of European Journal of Law and Technology (Volume 4, Number 1, 2013) is a special issue that contains several papers on legal educational technology, first presented at BILETA 2012: Conference of the British & Irish Legal Educational Technology Association, held 29-30 March 2012 in Newcastle, England, UK.

Here are the contents related to legal educational technology:

• Jonathan Bainbridge, Karen Counsell, Freda Grealy, Paul Maharg, Joel Mills, Rory O’Boyle: iPads in Legal Learning (iLEGALL): mobile devices in professional legal learning
• Wai Shun Chow & Firew Kebede Tiba: Professional Legal Education Reviews: Too Many “What”s, Too Few “How”s.
• Graeme Broadbent & Pamela Sellman: Images of Law and Legal Education: Law School websites and the provision of information
• Janice Ann Denoncourt: Using Film to Enhance Intellectual Property Law Education: Getting the Message Across
• Patricia McKellar & Steven Warburton: Developing an e-reader and e-publishing model for flexible and open learning on a distance learning LLB programme
• Antoinette Muntjewerff: CASE reading, structuring and analyzing decisions by judges
• Philip Leith & Cynthia Fellows: BAILII, Legal Education and Open Access to Law
• Emily Allbon: Too cool for (law) school? Using technology to engage students in legal skills
• Sandra Meredith: Critical review of referencing software when used with OSCOLA

HT @nzjudi

Legal Document Cloud

There has been some discussion recently of a legal document cloud: a version, specifically for legal texts, of DocumentCloud, the online document repository for journalists that uses OpenCalais to perform semantic analysis and annotation of documents.

[Here is a recent example of the use of DocumentCloud to annotate a legal text, in this instance the U.S. federal district court decision, in the National Security Letters case.]

As he was leaving the Open Data Day DC 2013 hackathon, Alan deLevie tweeted about a legal document cloud.

In a Twitter discussion of this topic at the end of Open Data Day DC 2013, Jonathan Stray said that Docracy is a legal document cloud service, with version control. [Docracy has just opened a beta version of a new technology called The Document Genome, that performs legal document comparison, summarization, and versioning, for a number of applications including compliance.]

Stray also suggested using the Associated Press’s Overview platform to do classification (tagging) of legal document collections.

Then, on March 5, 2013, Alan deLevie posted a readme for a proposed legal document cloud, on GitHub. Here are excerpts of the readme:

What?

I’m trying to build a set of standardized tools for one basic task: Looping through lots of law-related text, processing it, and saving the results. [...]

Why?

Under the hood, you’ll get parallelism and remote code execution from IronWorker. This has several advantages over running this code on your laptop:

Performance. Splitting up the work into chunks is an obvious win.

Reliability. In the middle of a large processing job, and the power goes out and your laptop battery is about to die? No worries. Your job continues to run, with results stored safely.

Curation. The legal informatics/open government/open data communities are coalescing in a great way. Many standalone scripts are emerging for specific text processing tasks. I’d like this repo to be a central place where anyone can quickly make use of these great tools. Batteries included will lower barriers to entry.

Standardization. The legal informatics community could gain by adopting a standard project structure.

Verification. This builds off of point 4. Need to show how you arrived at a certain set of findings? This could be done in maybe ~20 lines of code.

I envision something as simple as installing a Ruby gem, adding some API keys, mixing and matching text processors to suit your needs, then running your corpus through in a simple loop. [...]

A related resource: in October 2012 Elmer Masters of CALI described his proposal for a new cloud-based repository of court decisions, called CourtCloud.

If you know of other information regarding a legal document cloud, please share it in the comments to this post.

[NOTE: Edited on 18 March 2013 to clarify that the idea of a legal document cloud was not discussed aloud at Open Data Day DC 2013 but was instead mentioned on Twitter by Alan deLevie as he was leaving Open Data Day DC 2013. HT @adelevie here and here.]

More white papers from Summit on the Use of Technology to Expand Access to Justice, in Harvard JOLT

Several white papers from the 2012 Summit on the Use of Technology to Expand Access to Justice have been published as Occasional Papers by Harvard Journal of Law & Technology:

• John M. Greacen and William L. Jones: Summit on the Use of Technology to Expand Access to Justice: Analytical Framework
• Stephanie Kimbro: Using Technology to Unbundle in the Legal Services Community
• Marc Lauritsen: A Decision Space for Legal Service Delivery
• Susan Ledray: Virtual Services Whitepaper
• Richard Zorza: Preliminary Thoughts on Blue Sky Technology Driven Access and Decision Systems

HT @LSCtweets

Sunlight Foundation’s Open Legislative Data Report Card

Sunlight Foundation has made publicly available its OpenStates Legislative Data Report Card, which grades U.S. states on how their “legislatures make their data publicly available.”

James Turk describes the service in a new post entitled Open States: Transparency Report Card, at Sunlight Foundation Blog.

Here is an excerpt:

[...] How could we derive a measure of how “open” a state’s legislative data was?

After some consideration, we came up with six criteria on which each state could be evaluated, based on six of the Ten Principles for Opening Up Government Information: completeness, timeliness, machine readability, use of commonly owned standards and permanence. We omitted four of the original ten criteria (primacy, non-discrimination, licensing and usage costs) that tended not to present serious differences between states.

Evaluating each state on each criteria was a large task, and with community support we ensured that each state was evaluated by multiple people. After the evaluation was complete, we converted the qualitative data on how a state performed to numeric scores (specific scoring details are available on the report card itself). After summing these scores, states were also assigned a letter grade according to where they fell among their peers. A state with a net score below negative one was given an F, a negative one or zero became a D. With the average total score among states being a 1.5, we gave states with a net score of one or two a C, three became a B, and four and above became an A.

The final breakdown was 8 As, 12 Bs, 20 Cs, 6 Ds, and 6 Fs. If you’re interested in how your state did compared to others you can check out all the details on the Open Legislative Data Report Card. [...]

For more details, please see the complete post.

HT @lizbart

Ossowski (ed.): Agreement Technologies

Springer has published an article collection entitled Agreement Technologies (2013), edited by Professor Dr. Sascha Ossowski of Universidad Rey Juan Carlos.

The book is volume 8 in the the Law, Governance and Technology Series.

Here are excerpts from the preface:

This book describes the state of the art in the emerging field of Agreement Technologies (AT). AT refer to computer systems in which autonomous software agents negotiate with one another, typically on behalf of humans, in order to come to mutually acceptable agreements. [...]

The book was produced in the framework of [the EU-funded] COST Action IC0801 on Agreement Technologies.

This book [...] is subdivided into seven parts.

• Part I is dedicated to foundational issues of Agreement Technologies, examining the notion of agreement and agreement processes from different perspectives. [...]
• Part II outlines the relevance of novel approaches to Semantics and ontological alignments in distributed settings.
• Part III gives an overview of approaches for modelling norms and normative systems, the simulation of their dynamics, and their
  impact on the other key areas of Agreement Technologies.
• Part IV discusses how to design computational organisations, how to reason about them, and how organisational models can be evolved.
• Part V gives an overview of current approaches to argumentation and negotiation, and how they can be used to inform human reasoning, as well as to assist machine reasoning.
• Part VI describes different models and mechanisms of trust and reputation, and discusses their relevance for the other key areas of Agreement Technologies. [...]
• Part VII provides examples of how the techniques outlined in the previous parts of the book can be used to build distributed software applications that solve real-world problems.

Please notice that the parts are supported by a set of video-lectures that can be freely downloaded from the web.