Hagan: Open Law Lab

Dr. Margaret Hagan of Stanford Law School has launched Open Law Lab, “an initiative to design law – to make it more accessible, more usable, and more engaging.”

Dr. Hagan says that the Lab currently is a nonprofit collaborative project among law students.

The Lab’s work currently addresses:

• Visualization of legal information
• Improvements in dispute resolution
• Legal educational technology with an emphasis on gamification
• Court technology, under the rubric of Usable court systems
• Technology and innovation in access to justice

For more information, please see the Open Law Lab Website.

HT @margarethagan here and here

Morocco: Court of Cassation to begin digital projects

The Moroccan Court of Cassation has announced plans to undertake several digital projects, including implementing electronic document management and case management and virtual hearings, according to the article La Cour de cassation à l’heure du numérique: Vers l’utilisation des NTIC dans le traitement et la gestion des dossiers, Libération Maroc, 24 January 2013.

HT @GderoubaiX and @adreagui

JURIX 2012: 17-19 December

JURIX 2012: International Conference on Legal Knowledge and Information Systems is being held 17-19 December 2012, at Leibniz Center for Law, University of Amsterdam.

The Twitter hashtag for the conference is #jurix2012

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

Click here for the conference program.

Click here for the list of workshops and tutorials.

HT @jurixfoundation

Archived Tweets for CFCT 2012: Canadian Forum on Court Technology

Archived tweets are available, in .csv format for CFCT 2012: Canadian Forum on Court Technology, held 24-25 October in Montreal.

Twitter hashtags for the conference are #cfct and #cfct2012

Click here for the conference Website.

Click here for the conference program.

7 September: Extended CfP Deadline for JURIX 2012

The call for papers submission deadline for JURIX 2012: International Conference on Legal Knowledge and Information Systems has been extended to 7 September 2012.

Click here for the call for papers.

The conference will be held 17-19 December 2012 at the University of Amsterdam.

Papers are invited “on the advanced management of legal information and knowledge, covering foundations, methods, tools, systems and applications” concerning the following topics:

• Support for lawyers, in legal reasoning, document drafting, negotiation;
• Support for the production and management of legislation, in agenda setting, policy analysis, drafting, workflow management, monitoring implementation;
• Support for the judiciary, in application of the law, analysis of evidence, management of cases;
• Support for police activities, in forensic inquiries, search and evaluation of evidence, management of investigations;
• Support for public administration, in applying regulations and managing information;
• Support for the acquisition, management or use of legal knowledge, using rules, cases, neural networks, intelligent agents or other methods;
• Systems and methods to support policies and legal issues for social networks;
• Retrieval of legal information;
• Legal education;
• Digital-rights management;
• Alternative dispute resolution, particularly on-line;
• Regulatory compliance and compliance of business processes;
• Theoretical foundations for the use of Artificial Intelligence techniques in the legal domain;
• Models of legal knowledge, including concepts (legal ontologies), rules, cases, principles, values and procedures;
• Legal inference and argumentation;
• Verification and validation of legal knowledge systems;
• Management of legal information in the semantic web;
• XML standards for legal documents, including legislative, judicial, administrative acts as well as private documents, such as contracts;
• Modelling the legal interactions of autonomous agents and digital institutions;
• Methods for managing organizational change when introducing legal knowledge systems;
• Evaluation of systems using advanced informatics techniques in legal applications;
• Interdisciplinary applications of legal informatics methods and systems.

For more information, please see the call for papers.

HT Dr. Rinke Hoekstra.

Call for Papers: JURIX 2012: International Conference on Legal Knowledge and Information Systems

A call for papers — with submission deadline of 1 September 2012 — has been issued for JURIX 2012: The 25th International Conference on Legal Knowledge and Information Systems, to be held 17-19 December 2012, at the University of Amsterdam, in Amsterdam, The Netherlands.

Papers are invited “on the advanced management of legal information and knowledge, covering foundations, methods, tools, systems and applications” concerning the following topics:

• Support for lawyers, in legal reasoning, document drafting, negotiation;
• Support for the production and management of legislation, in agenda setting, policy analysis, drafting, workflow management, monitoring implementation;
• Support for the judiciary, in application of the law, analysis of evidence, management of cases;
• Support for police activities, in forensic inquiries, search and evaluation of evidence, management of investigations;
• Support for public administration, in applying regulations and managing information;
• Support for the acquisition, management or use of legal knowledge, using rules, cases, neural networks, intelligent agents or other methods;
• Systems and methods to support policies and legal issues for social networks;
• Retrieval of legal information;
• Legal education;
• Digital-rights management;
• Alternative dispute resolution, particularly on-line;
• Regulatory compliance and compliance of business processes;
• Theoretical foundations for the use of Artificial Intelligence techniques in the legal domain;
• Models of legal knowledge, including concepts (legal ontologies), rules, cases, principles, values and procedures;
• Legal inference and argumentation;
• Verification and validation of legal knowledge systems;
• Management of legal information in the semantic web;
• XML standards for legal documents, including legislative, judicial, administrative acts as well as private documents, such as contracts;
• Modelling the legal interactions of autonomous agents and digital institutions;
• Methods for managing organizational change when introducing legal knowledge systems;
• Evaluation of systems using advanced informatics techniques in legal applications;
• Interdisciplinary applications of legal informatics methods and systems.

For more information, please see the call for papers.

HT Professor Dr. Burkhard Schafer.

CALI’s Free Online Course on Digital Law Practice

CALI, the Center for Computer Assisted Legal Instruction, is offering a free, online course on digital law practice, from 10 February – 6 April 2012.

The Twitter hashtag for the course is #tdlp.

The course will address topics including management of a virtual law office, electronic document automation and standardization, court technology, unauthorized practice of law, unbundling of legal service, and lawyers’ use of social media.

The instructors include Stephanie Kimbro, Marc Lauritsen, Richard Granat, Ronald Staudt, Kingsley Martin, Sarah Glassmeyer, William Hornsby, and Ernest Svenson.

For registration or more information, please see the course Website.

Slides Available for CTC 2011: Court Technology Conference

Slides are available for many of the presentations given at CTC 2011: The 2011 Court Technology Conference (Twitter hashtag #ctc2011), held 4-6 October 2011 in Long Beach, California, USA.

The presentations included:

• Dean Peter W. Martin of Cornell University Law School on Abandoning Law Reports for Official Digital Case Law;
• James E. McMillan of the National Center for State Courts on Trends of New Courthouse Designs and Courthouse Technologies; and
• Judge Dory Reiling, mag. iur., Ph.D., Vice President of the Amsterdam District Court on Measuring Court Performance.

For more information, please see the complete conference program.

McMillan on E-Filing Systems for Self-Represented Litigants

James E. McMillan of the National Center for State Courts has posted E-Filing Must Support the Self-Represented, Court Technology Bulletin, 8 September 2011.

This is the latest post in Mr. McMillan’s series, Eight Rules of E-Filing.

In this post, Mr. McMillan argues that e-filing systems implemented by courts in which large numbers of self-represented litigants appear must be designed for use by those litigants. Mr. McMillan then describes a number of court technologies that that enable self-represented litigants to file litigation papers online.

For more information, please see the complete post.

Krontiris on Mobile Justice

Kate Krontiris of Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government and the MIT Sloan School of Management has released two new posts on the topic of “mobile justice”: Mobile Justice in 500 Words, and On the Many Manifestations of “Mobile Justice,” on her tumblr.

In the first post, Ms. Krontiris defines “mobile justice” as “the idea that mobile technologies, broadly defined, can be used to extend and improve access to justice.” She states that the term “includes initiatives such as virtual courts in Kenya, live-streamed court proceedings in Massachusetts, and SMS-sharing of legal judgments in Ghana”; and that mobile justice efforts are being undertaken by governments, civil society organizations, and businesses, and “almost always require the strong collaboration of all of these stakeholders.” The post goes on to discuss how mobile justice initiatives are being used in the reform of judicial processes, and may contribute to improving the rule of law and human rights enforcement in many jurisdictions.

In the second post, Ms. Krontiris discusses private mobile justice providers. The post focuses on Crimefighters, a “[c]onfidential information hotline” — offered in Ghana by mobile phone company MTN — that enables citizens to report crimes via mobile phone, free of charge. With MTN as an example, the post discusses “the emerging role of private actors in resourcing public” justice information and communication services.

These posts follow on Ms. Krontiris’s 2010 post on mobile justice, Using Technology to Bridge the Gap, at the U.S. Department of State’s DipNote blog, and her 2010 post, On the Potential of Mobile Justice, at Huffington Post.