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.

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.]

Masters on CourtCloud: A New Repository for Court Opinions

Elmer Masters of CALI introduced a new technology called CourtCloud today in a presentation at LVI 2012: Law via the Internet Conference.

Here is a description of CourtCloud from the service’s Website:

• CourtCloud is a repository for court opinions.
• Only the court can upload documents to CourtCloud.
• Save word processor files in the desktop CourtCloud folder.
• Saved word processor files are copied to the CourtCloud server.
• CourtCloud processes the document creating PDF, HTML, and XML versions.
• The files are stored in the court’s CourtCloud folder.
• Original file + PDF, HTML, XML versions are available on the desktop and archived on the server.
• There is no direct public access to CourtCloud.
• Opinions saved to CourtCloud are added to the Free Law Reporter
• Free Law Reporter provides powerful searching and public API for access.

Click here for Twitter tweets about the presentation.

Call for Proposals: ReInventLaw Dubai 2012: An ‘Un’conference on Law, Technology, Innovation, and Entrepreneurship

A call for presentation proposals — with submission deadline of 15 October 2012 — has been issued for ReInventLaw Dubai 2012: “an ‘un’conference devoted to law, technology, innovation, and entrepreneurship” — to be held 10 December 2012 at Media City in Dubai.

The organizers particularly welcome presentations about innovations in legal services or legal education. Presentations can take the form of 6 Minute Ignite Style Presentations or 12 Minute “TED Style” Presentations.

Registration is free.

The event Website describes the event as follows:

ReInvent Law Dubai is an “un”conference devoted to law, technology, innovation, and entrepreneurship.

Anyone interested in the future of law or technology or entrepreneurship will want to participate. Come hear about the innovative ideas generated by the highly-engaging atmosphere of the event!

The event is being sponsored by The ReInventLaw Laboratory at Michigan State University College of Law, and is modeled on the LawTechCamp London 2012 event held last summer.

For more information, please see the ReInventLaw Dubai 2012 Website.

HT @computational.

ReInvent Law Dubai 2012: Unconference on Law, Technology, Innovation, and Entrepreneurship

ReInvent Law Dubai 2012: Unconference on Law, Technology, Innovation, and Entrepreneurship will be held 10 December 2012 at Dubai Knowledge Village, Dubai, UAE, according to an announcement at Computational Legal Studies.

The event’s organizers will be Professor Dr. Daniel Martin Katz and Professor Renee Newman Knake, both of the Michigan State University College of Law and its new ReInvent Law Laboratory.

According to the event brochure:

ReInvent Law Dubai is an (un)conference focusing on law, technology, innovation and entrepreneurship. Building upon the success of the recent London event, leaders in the fields of law, technology and beyond will come together to share ideas about innovation in the delivery of legal services.

This event is Free, Open and Participatory. Anyone can propose a topic. Entrepreneurs, new media/technology enthusiasts, legal professionals, social networkers, and those curious about future innovation in law and technology will want to attend.

The Michigan State University College of Law Graduate Program at MSU Dubai is a primary sponsor.

For more information, please see the announcement.

HT @computational.

June 29: LawTechCamp London

LawTechCamp London 2012 — “a BarCamp-style community UnConference for new media and technology enthusiasts and legal professionals” — will be held 29 June 2012 in London, England, UK.

The Twitter hashtag for the conference is #lawtechcamplondon.

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

Click here for the conference program.

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.

Program Posted for LawTechCamp London 2012

The program has been posted for LawTechCamp London 2012 — “a BarCamp-style community UnConference for new media and technology enthusiasts and legal professionals” — to be held 29 June 2012 in London, England, UK.

The Twitter hashtag for the conference is #lawtechcamplondon.

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.

Hendler on Organizing and Accessing Code-like Legal Materials

Alex M. Hendler, Esq., of ontolawgy LLC, has posted How to eat legislative sausage, on the ontolawgy Blog.

In this post, Mr. Hendler describes methods for organizing digital versions of codified statutes or regulations, citing Tom Bruce’s recent post on legislative identifiers and Grant Vergottini’s response to Tom’s post. Mr. Hendler explains how his cloud-based legal analysis and knowledge management system, called ontolawgy, which uses Semantic Web technology, addresses the issues raised in those posts.

In the second part of his post, Mr. Hendler argues that digital full-text versions of U.S. federal statutes and regulations currently available from the U.S. Government are flawed, particularly respecting indentation. He writes:

If anyone has some insight about how to get the government to bring useful and accurate indentation to its official publications, please get in touch, I would be thrilled to work with you to help make this happen.

For more information, please see the complete post.

New Discussion: Bommarito on Hands-on Examples of Legal Search

Michael J. Bommarito II of Computational Legal Studies has started a discussion entitled Hands-on Examples of Legal Search, in the LinkedIn group of the International Association for Artificial Intelligence and Law (IAAIL).

The examples are Mr. Bommarito’s recent work describing cloud-based approaches to legal information retrieval and eDiscovery using AWS CloudSearch (here, here, and here), and information retrieval of statutes using Lucene.

For more information, please see the complete post.

Lexum Launches Cloud-Based Tribunal Decision Service

Lexum, the legal technology firm that developed the Canadian Legal Information Institute (CanLII), has introduced Decisia, a new cloud-based service for managing decisions of courts and other tribunals.

According to the description of the service, Decisia includes templates and forms enabling standardization of frequently produced types of decisions.

Click here for videos describing Decisia.