April 26: CodeX FutureLaw 2013 Conference: Tweets and Resources

The CodeX FutureLaw 2013 Conference is being held 26 April 2013 at Stanford Law School, Stanford, California, USA.

The conference focuses ‘on how technology is changing the landscape of the legal profession and the law more broadly. The conference will bring together leading thinkers, entrepreneurs, investors and technologists that are experimenting and actively working to re-architect the future of the law. If you’re of a similar mind, we’d love to have you there.’

Click here for the conference program.

The Twitter hashtag for the conference is #futurelaw

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

The conference Chair was Tim Hwang.

The legal informatics-oriented panels at the conference include:

• Legal Disruption: Why Now? Why Here? What Next?
• Computational Law and Contracts
• Designing Legal Data
• Open Source Legal Practice

Professor Dr. Daniel Martin Katz of Michigan State University and the ReInventLaw Lab will give the closing keynote address.

The conference is sponsored by CodeX: The Stanford Center for Legal Informatics.

Please see the comments to this post for additional resources related to the conference.

LawWithoutWalls Conposium 2013: Tweets and Resources

The LawWithoutWalls Conposium 2013 was held 13-14 April 2013 at the University of Miami School of Law in Miami, Florida, USA.

Here is a description of LawWithoutWalls:

LawWithoutWalls is a part-virtual, educational collaboratory created by Michele DeStefano and Michael Bossone at the University of Miami School of Law. It brings together a transdisciplinary group of people and institutions from around the world to engage on the burning issues facing the legal profession, collaboratively solve legal problems, and develop the skillsets needed to thrive in the new, global legal marketplace.

The 2013 Conposium presentations — during which “teams present their Projects of Worth (and prototypes) to a panel of judges” — included a number on new legal information or communication systems.

Click here for the event schedule.

The Twitter hashtag for the event was #lwow2013

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

Tweets from LexThink.1 2013

Twitter tweets from LexThink.1 2013 lightning talks about innovation in legal technology and law practice, held 3 April 2013 in Chicago, Illinois, are now archived in .csv format.

The Twitter hashtag for the event was #lexthink

Click here for the event’s program.

Click here for the event’s Website.

ReInventLaw Channel: Videos of Talks at ReInventLaw Events

The ReInventLaw Channel is now available, providing access to videos of presentations given at ReInventLaw conferences.

The presentations cover topics including innovation in legal technology and legal services delivery.

The channel currently includes videos of presentations given at ReInventLaw Silicon Valley 2013 and LawTechCamp London 2012.

The channel is produced by the ReInventLaw Lab at Michigan State University College of Law.

HT @computational

Knake on Democratizing Legal Education

Professor Renee Newman Knake of Michigan State University and the ReInventLaw Lab has posted Democratizing Legal Education, forthcoming in Connecticut Law Review.

Here is the abstract:

Millions of Americans lack representation for their legal problems while thousands of lawyers are unemployed. Why? Commentators and academics offer a range of answers to this question, from economic factors to regulatory constraints. Whatever the root cause, clearly a massive delivery problem exists for personal legal services. Most individuals simply do not realize when a lawyer might be necessary or helpful. This Article, written at the invitation of the Connecticut Law Review for their Volume 45 Symposium entitled “Are Law School’s Passing the Bar? Examining the Demands and Limitations of the Legal Education Market,” suggests that democratizing legal education — i.e., systematically providing basic information about how to access legal services to the general public — offers a solution to the unmet need for those services, as well as to the unemployment crisis among the legal profession more broadly. Law schools have an important role to play in this effort. This article offers three recommendations.

The recommendations are:

First, law schools can fuel innovation in new markets and in methods for delivery, thereby leading to greater public awareness of legal services. Second, schools and regulators should work together to reduce the cost and time involved in training and licensing for lawyers who desire to engage in limited practice areas that are underserved, such as housing, domestic relations, and child custody. Third, law schools should educate the public about law, lawyers, and legal services through programs that also enhance student learning.

Proposals invited for talks at ReInventLaw London 2013

Proposals are now invited for talks at the ReInventLaw London 2013 Conference, to be held 14 June 2013, in London, England.

The proposal submission deadline is 5 April 2013.

The conference is organized by Professor Dr. Daniel Martin Katz and Professor Renee Newman Knake of the ReInventLaw Laboratory at Michigan State University College of Law.

Talks will be chosen by a crowdsourced voting process.

Here are the proposal guidelines:

Talks must relate to some aspect of law + technology + innovation + entrepreneurship.

This is about big ideas—no sales pitches or product pushing.

Submit a talk pitch of 300 words or a link to a 30 second YouTube video by midnight April 5, 2013.

Voting opens after submission window is complete at http://www.ReInventLawLondon.com

One person, one vote—but feel free to encourage colleagues, friends, family and more to vote for your pitch!

Winners will have up to 10 minutes to speak, and will then respond to dynamic, real-time, audience-driven Q&A. [...]

For more details, please see the conference Website.

HT @reneeknake

Maclean: Rethinking Law as Process: Creativity, Novelty, Change

Dr. James Maclean of the University of Southampton Law School has published a new book entitled Rethinking Law as Process: Creativity, Novelty, Change, (Routledge, 2013).

Here is the abstract:

Rethinking Law as Process draws on insights from ‘process philosophy’ in order to rethink the nature of legal decision-making. While there have been significant developments in the application of ‘process’ thought across a number of disciplines, little notice has been taken of Whiteheadian metaphysics in law. Nevertheless, process thought offers significant opportunities for serious inquiry into the nature of legal reasoning and the practical application of law. Focusing on the practices of organising, rather than their effects, an increased processual awareness re-orients understanding away from the mechanistic and rationalist assumptions of Newtonian thought, and towards the interminable ontological quest to arrest or to classify the essentially undivided flow of human experience. Drawing together insights from a number of different fields, James Maclean argues that it is because our inherited conceptual framework is tied to a ‘static’ way of thinking that every attempt to offer justifying reasons for legal decisions appears at best to register only at the level of explanation. Rethinking Law as Process resolves this problem, and so provides a more adequate description of the nature of law and legal decision-making, by repositioning law within a thoroughly processual world-view, in which there is only the continuous effort to refine and to redefine the continuous flux of legal understanding.

This book could provide a theoretical framework for research on a number of recent developments in legal technology, law practice, and legal education, including legal decision support systems, legal compliance systems, norm development in multiagent systems, the unbundling of legal services, legal process management, and innovation in legal technology, law practice, legal services delivery, and legal education.

HT @law_book

Registration open: CodeX FutureLaw 2013: Conference on Technology & Legal Profession, 26 April

Tim Hwang tells us that registration is now open for CodeX FutureLaw 2013, “a conference focusing on how technology is changing the landscape of the legal profession and the law more broadly,” to be held 26 April 2013 at Stanford Law School, Stanford, California, USA.

Tim is Chair of the conference.

The legal informatics topics to be addressed during the conference sessions include:

• Legal Disruption: Why Now? Why Here? What Next?
• Computational Law and Contracts
• Designing Legal Data
• Open Source Legal Practice

Speakers include:

• Itai Gurari of Judicata
• Tony Lai of LawGives
• Daniel Lewis of Ravel Law
• Tim Stanley of Justia
• Ed Walters of Fastcase

For more details, please see the conference Website.

HT Tim Hwang

Hwang on Scoping Legal Hacking

Tim Hwang of the University of California Berkeley School of Law has posted Letter One: Scoping “Legal Hacking”, at the Robot, Robot & Hwang Blog.

In this post Tim defines the terms “legal hackers” and “legal hacking” respecting three dimensions of meaning: “The Organizational and Human Capital of the Lawyer,” “The Tools of The Lawyer,” and “An Approach Towards The Law.” Respecting the last dimension, he explains:

Lawyers, then, are legal hackers insofar as they play with the law, find loopholes, stretch definitions, and make novel arguments. Technologists are legal hackers insofar as they launch technologies which disrupt existing legal distinctions, subvert the application of law, or otherwise raise questions about the integrity of the system.

For more information, please see the complete post.

Click here for more on recent legal hacking events.

Resources About LawTechCamp London 2012

This post lists selected resources related to LawTechCamp London 2012 — “a BarCamp-style community UnConference for new media and technology enthusiasts and legal professionals” — held 29 June 2012 in London, England, UK.

Click here for the conference program.

Here is Twitter-related information about the event:

• The Twitter hashtag for the conference is #lawtechcamplondon.
• For archived Twitter tweets, in .csv format: click here for tweets dated 28-29 June 2012; click here for tweets dated 30 June-4 July 2012.
• For Ann Priestley’s graphs of tweeters and tweet volume, click here.
• For Ann Priestley’s TAGSExplorer network graph of tweeters, click here.
• LegalAware: my #lawtechcamplondon cloud.

Here are posts and other resources about the event that I’ve been able to identify [please mention others in the comments]:

• Ajaz Ahmed’s presentation described in Legal Futures: Freeserve founder says it will take non-lawyers to bring innovation to “hated” legal market.
• Paul Bernal: Privacy Is Not the Enemy….
• Josh Blackman: Josh Blackman Presents at LawTechCamp London 2012 – Assisted Decision Making.
• Michael Bossone: PUSH: A Spoken Word Poem about Law, Technology, and Fear.
• Chris Dale: Moving on the discussion and ways of presentation at Lawtech Camp London.
• Michele DeStefano: Virtual Third Places: Making Room in the Law Market.
• John Flood: LawTechCamp London 2012.
• Joanna Goodman: Unconference! Beat poetry and quantitative analysis – we are all futurists now! (HT Brian Inkster)
• Monica Goyal: Challenges of Late Adoption.
• Monica Goyal: LawTechCamp London.
• Jon Harman: Reflections, Pushing and #LawTechCampLondon.
• Brian Inkster at The Time Blawg: LawTech Camp London 2012: In Tweets.
• Brian Inkster at The Time Blawg: LawTech Camp London 2012 Reviewed: Time to Push.
• Renee Newman Knake: Innovation in the Delivery of Legal Services.
• Renee Newman Knake: Recap of LawTechCamp London - renamed ReInvent Law London 2013.
• Renee Newman Knake: Technology and Untapped Markets in Law, a Pecha Kucha talk for LawTechCamp London.
• Marc Lauritsen: Ontologies and Openness in Law Practice Automation.
• LawSync: Law Tech Camp London 2012.
• Legal 2.0: Stuff I might have said at LawTechCamp London.
• Legal Aware: John Flood chairs a debate on the impact of the Cloud on law and legal education #LawTechCampLondon 2012.
• Legal Aware: #LawTechCampLondon 2012 : where law confronted innovation.
• LegalAware: my #lawtechcamplondon cloud.
• Paul Maharg: LawTechCamp, London (HT Ann Priestley).
• Tom McGinn at VirtualCourthouse: LawTechCampLondon 2012 (HT Brian Inkster).
• Alastair Moyes writing in Law Society Gazette: Challenging the speed of change (HT Brian Inkster).
• Richard Parnham: A tale of two conferences (HT Brian Inkster).
• Ann Priestley: #lawtechcamplondon 1: disruptive innovation?
• Ann Priestley: #lawtechcamplondon: data and disruption.
• Ann Priestley: #lawtechcamplondon: reinventing the law conference.
• Real Business Intelligence: Kicking the Machine.
• Neil Rose at Legal Futures: The next big thing.
• John Sheridan and The National Archives: Experts to contribute to world-leading legislation website.
• Solicitors Journal: Lawyers told to invest in ‘great ideas, not spreadsheets’ (HT Brian Inkster).
• Valentino Spataro has created a #lawtechcamplondon group on the Gloxa platform.
• Richard Susskind’s keynote address described by Legal Futures: “More for less”, liberalisation and technology: Susskind lays out vision of the future.
• Adam Wyner: 21st Century Law Practice and Law Tech Camp Presentations (HT Ann Priestley).

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.