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.]

Jaquith, Masters, and Mill on Syntax/Formats for Online Legal Resources

Waldo Jaquith of The State Decoded, Elmer Masters of CALI, and Eric Mill of Sunlight Foundation yesterday had an interesting conversation on Twitter about appropriate syntax and formats for online legal resources, focusing on Markdown, AsciiDoc, and EPUB.

They kindly agreed to let me to make a storify of their discussion, which is now available here.

Thanks to Waldo, Elmer, and Eric.

Masters on Hackthelaw: Piratebox meets Free Law

Elmer Masters, JD, MLS, of CALI, has posted Hackthelaw: Piratebox meets Free Law, at his blog, <CONTENT /> v.5.

Here is an excerpt:

The hackthelaw box is an open, anonymous network stocked with primary and secondary legal materials that are freely available for download. People can connect to the network and download any of the materials as well as chat with others connected to the network. All this is in a closed network space separate from the Internet. I can easily imagine setting this up in a library as a way for folks to access legal materials and even ask basic questions about the resources. Any device that has WiFi can connect to the network, so folks could download materials directly to their phones or tablets as well as laptops. Consider hackthelaw as another Free Law access point.

Beyond being a distribution node for Free Law, devices like hackthelaw have potential uses in legal education and practice. A closed private network could be used to distribute and receive law school exams. A professor could launch a network at the beginning of a class to provide students with that day’s material. In practice such a device could be used for gather initial client intake information. In conferences or negotiations a private network could handle the exchange of documents between parties. There are lots of possibilities here, and, as time becomes available, I hope to be looking into some of them in the not too distant future.

If you’re interested, I’ll be running some sort of hackthelaw device at the CALI booth in the AALS exhibit hall in New Orleans, January 4 -6, 2013.

HT @emasters

Masters: CALI Legal Topics Expressed as a Hierarchical Drupal Taxonomy

Elmer Masters, JD, MLIS, of CALI has posted an image of the CALI legal topics subject list as a hierarchical Drupal taxonomy.

Click here for other resources on legal knowledge representation.

HT @emasters

Masters Updates List of Law Schools Using Drupal

Elmer Masters, JD, MLS, of CALI has updated his list of law schools that use the Drupal open source content management system.

HT Elmer

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.

Masters: The Future of The Legal (Case)Book Is The Web

Elmer Masters, Esq., of the Center for Computer-Assisted Legal Instruction (CALI) has posted The Future of the (Case)Book Is the Web, at the CALI Spotlight Blog.

In this post, Elmer advocates the publication of free and open legal casebooks on the free Web, using the open EPUB format. He describes CALI’s eLangdell legal open educational resource service as an example of this approach.

For more information, please see the complete post.

DPLLA: Digital Public Law Library of America

Interesting tweets about a proposed, free, and open Digital Public Law Library of America ( #DPLLA ) started/inspired by @emasters @johnpmayer @jpalfrey @kenhirsh . (Elmer’s #OccupytheLaw tweet immediately preceded this thread.) See especially Dean Palfrey’s chair lecture and article.

Occupy the Law

THIS —-> MT @emasters And we do need a digital public law library. Unencumbered access to legal materials is necessary. #OccupyTheLaw?

June 23-25: CALICon 2011: Conference on Law School Computing

CALICON 2011: The Conference on Law School Computing, will be held June 23-25, 2011, at Marquette University Law School, in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, USA.

The conference is organized by CALI: The Center for Computer-Assisted Legal Instruction.

Click here for the conference program, which includes presentations and panels on many recent legal technology developments.

Click here for live Webcasts of conference events.

The Twitter hashtag for the conference is #calicon11.