Bell on the Future of Legal Research

Professor Dr. John Bell of the University of Cambridge has published The Future of Legal Research, Legal Information Management, 12(4), 314-317 (2012).

Here is the abstract:

This article is based on a presentation given by John Bell at the annual conference of The Society of Legal Scholars (SLS) held in Bristol in September 2012. His talk reflects the immediate challenges facing law schools, academic lawyers and the legal publishing industry in the light of the recent Finch Report and the subsequent response by the Government whereby it has adopted an open access policy to publicly funded research.’

Adreani on Juricaf

Guillaume Adreani of AHJUCAF has posted slides of his presentation entitled Retour d’expérience sur Juricaf, given 27 November 2012 at the ADBS event, Le moteur de recherche interne, élément clé de l’accès à l’information dans l’entreprise, in Lyon, France.

The slides describe the technology Mr. Adreani used to create Juricaf, the free and open database of francophone supreme court decisions.

For more information about Juricaf, please see Mr. Adreani’s blog {Données juridiques}, and the posts here.

HT @adreagui

November 21-23: Journées européennes d’informatique juridique: European Legal e-Access Conference

Journées européennes d’informatique juridique: European Legal e-Access Conference is being held 21-23 November 2012 in Paris.

The Twitter hashtag for the conference is #legalaccess2012

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

Click here for the conference program.

Click here for abstracts and slides of some of the presentations.

See the comments to this post for links to additional videos, slides, and papers from the conference and posts about the conference.

[NOTE: Updated 29 November 2012 to add the line referring readers to the comments.]

[NOTE: Updated 23 November 2012 to link to archived Twitter tweets.]

Sinha on Speed and Relevance Improvements to Indian Kanoon

Dr. Sushant Sinha of Indian Kanoon has posted Faster and More Relevant Kanoon!, at the Indian Kanoon forums.

He writes:

A new release of IndianKanoon brings in the following changes:
1. A new tiering function that slims down the top tier and significantly improves the time taken to execute a query.
2. A new ranking function to improve relevance.
3. Improved word matching and abbreviations. A search of “adm jabalpur” will match “additional district magistrate jabalpur”
http://www.indiankanoon.org/search/?formInput=adm+jabalpur
4. New operators ANDD, ORR and NOTT that can be used with words
5. Clicking on a document after a search query shows the contexts in the document in which the query appears.
6. Performance improvements coming from upgrade to Postgresql 9.2

For more information or to provide comments, please see the complete post.

HT @sushantsinha

Lu and Conrad on Bringing Order to Legal Documents: An Issue-based Recommendation System via Cluster Association

Qiang Lu and Jack G. Conrad, both of Thomson Reuters, will present a paper entitled Bringing Order to Legal Documents: An Issue-based Recommendation System via Cluster Association, at KEOD 2012: The 4th International Conference on Knowledge Engineering and Ontology Development, to be held 4-7 October 2012 in Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain.

Here is the abstract:

The task of recommending content to professionals (such as attorneys or brokers) differs greatly from the task of recommending news to casual readers. A casual reader may be satisfied with a couple of good recommendations, whereas an attorney will demand precise and comprehensive recommendations from various content sources when conducting legal research. Legal documents are intrinsically complex and multi-topical, contain carefully crafted, professional, domain-specific language, and possess a broad and unevenly distributed coverage of issues. Consequently, a high quality content recommendation system for legal documents requires the ability to detect significant topics from a document and recommend high quality content accordingly. Moreover, a litigation attorney preparing for a case needs to be thoroughly familiar the principal arguments associated with various supporting opinions, but also with the secondary and tertiary arguments as well. This paper introduces an issue-based content recommendation system with a built-in topic detection/segmentation algorithm for the legal domain. The system leverages existing legal document metadata such as topical classifications, document citations, and click stream data from user behavior databases, to produce an accurate topic detection algorithm. It then links each individual topic to a comprehensive pre-defined topic (cluster) repository via an association process. A cluster labeling algorithm is designed and applied to provide a precise, meaningful label for each of the clusters in the repository, where each cluster is also populated with member documents from across different content types. This system has been applied successfully to very large collections of legal documents, O(100M), which include judicial opinions, statutes, regulations, court briefs, and analytical documents. Extensive evaluations were conducted to determine the efficiency and effectiveness of the algorithms in topic detection, cluster association, and cluster labeling. Subsequent evaluations conducted by legal domain experts have demonstrated that the quality of the resulting recommendations across different content types is close to those created by human experts.

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

Thanks to Jack for allowing me to post the abstract.

Nevelow Mart & Luftig on Curation of Legal Resources, and Digest and Citator Results in Wexis

Professor Susan Nevelow Mart of the University of Colorado Boulder School of Law, and Professor Dr. Jeffrey T. Luftig of the University of Colorado, Boulder, have posted the abstract of a new paper entitled The Case for Curation: The Relevance of Digest and Citator Results in Westlaw and Lexis.

Here is the abstract:

Humans and machines are both involved in the creation of legal research resources. For legal information retrieval systems, the human-curated finding aid is being overtaken by the computer algorithm. But human-curated finding aids still exist. One of them is the West Key Number system. The Key Number system’s headnote classification of case law, started back in the nineteenth century, was and is the creation of humans. The retrospective headnote classification of the cases in Lexis’s case databases, started in 1999, was created primarily although not exclusively with computer algorithms. So how do these two very different systems deal with a similar headnote from the same case, when they link the headnote to the digesting and citator functions in their respective databases? This paper continues an investigation into this question, looking at the relevance of results from digest and citator search run on matching headnotes in ninety important federal and state cases, to see how each performs. For digests, where the results are curated – where a human has made a judgment about the meaning of a case and placed it in a classification system – humans still have an advantage. For citators, where algorithm is battling algorithm to find relevant results, it is a matter of the better algorithm winning. But no one algorithm is doing a very good job of finding all the relevant results; the overlap between the two citator systems is not that large. The lesson for researchers: know how your legal research system was created, what involvement, if any, humans had in the curation of the system, and what a researcher can and cannot expect from the system you are using.

This paper was presented at AALL 2012: American Association of Law Libraries’ Annual Meeting, held 21-24 July 2012, in Boston Massachusetts, USA.

Shecter on Making the California Laws Easy to Read

Robb Shecter, Esq., creator of OregonLaws.org and WebLaws.org, has posted Making the California Laws Easy to Read, at the Weblaws.org Blog.

In this post, Robb shows a screenshot of the new version of the California Codes that he is developing on the Weblaws.org platform. He says recent development of the Weblaws.org version of the California Codes is aimed at improving readability and navigation.

Robb also writes that the next steps of the the Weblaws.org California Codes development process will include adding many of the features of OregonLaws.org, including:

• Print feature
• Citations to sources
• Legal news
• Interlinked & related statutes
• Smart search

For more information, please see the complete post.

For more information on Robb’s approach to online legal publishing and free access to law, please see Robb’s VoxPopuLII post entitled The Recipe for Better Legal Information Services, and my post entitled WebLaws.org: What’s Next for This New Resource from Robb Shecter?

Fastcase Introduces e-Books, Beginning with Advance Sheets

Fastcase, the online legal research service, has begun publishing e-books in EPUB and .mobi formats, and the first set of Fastcase e-books consists of advance sheets of U.S. state and federal court decisions, according to Sean Doherty’s post, Fastcase’s Free E-Books May Disrupt Legal Book Publishing at Law Technology News, and the post, Fastcase eBooks: Advance Sheets are a Glimpse Into the Future, on Fastcase’s Legal Research Blog.

According to the Fastcase blog post, Fastcase advance sheets will be available “for each state, federal circuit, and U.S. Supreme Court”; will be free of charge and “licensed under [a] Creative Commons BY-SA license“; and will include summaries. Each e-Book Advance Sheet will contain “one month’s judicial opinions (designated as published and unpublished) for specific states or courts.”

According to Sean Doherty’s post, future Fastcase e-Books will include “e-book case reporters with official pagination and links” into the Fastcase database, as well as “topical reporters” on U.S. law, covering fields such as securities law and antitrust law.

According to the Fastcase blog post, Fastcase’s approach to e-Books is inspired in part by CALI‘s Free Law Reporter, which makes case law available as e-Books in EPUB format.

Fastcase’s adaptation of e-Book technology developed by CALI represents a notable example of knowledge-sharing between the nonprofit and for-profit sectors of the legal informatics community.

For more information, please see the Fastcase blog post, Sean Doherty’s post, Bob Ambrogi’s post, and Greg Lambert’s post.

For more information about Free Law Reporter, please see John Mayer’s post, The Free Law Reporter: Open Access to the Law and Beyond, at VoxPopuLII.

Juricaf Wins Open Data Award

Juricaf, the free database of francophone supreme court decisions, has been awarded the i-expo 2012 Trophée Open data, according to a post by Jean Gasnault entitled Juricaf – trophée I-Expo 2012 catégorie Open Data, at Juriconnexion.

According to the conference Website:

Ce trophée récompense une initiative innovante de réutilisation de données publiques, innovante, provenant du secteur public, privé ou associatif.

For more information on Juricaf, please see the post, Relaunch of Juricaf: Database of Francophone Supreme Court Decisions.

Congratulations to Guillaume Adreani of AHJUCAF, developer of Juricaf.

HT @juriconnexion.

Mobile Version of Indian Kanoon Available

A mobile version of Indian Kanoon, the free-access-to-law service for India, is now available, according to a new post by Dr. Sushant Sinha, creator of Indian Kanoon, in the Indian Kanoon forums.

Here is an excerpt from the post:

The Indian Kanoon website has a mobile version now. All pages are redesigned for fitting properly on small screen devices.

Tested on the android phone dell xcd35 and with various screen sizes in the android emulator. Feel free to report problems with your device. [...]

For more information, please see the complete post.

HT @sushantsinha.