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

Hwang Profiled by Fast Company

Tim Hwang of the University of California Berkeley School of Law has been profiled by Fast Company, the entrepreneurship magazine, in an article by Adam Bluestein entitled Tim Hwang Isn’t A Lawyer, But He Plays One Online (Fast Company, 3 May 2012).

In the article, Tim comments on legal technology innovation, including his own projects. Here are some excerpts:

I’m working on a toolkit that allows people to use computer code to program the behavior of corporations in the same way that you can program robots. To toolkit can cause a legal entity to generate subsidiaries, transfer assets, close down, and so on. [...]

One thing that got me intrigued about law was that industry-wide it has the same kind of structure as older industries that have been disrupted by technology: a small class of people that’s based on control of information, protected by regulations. Law hasn’t had its Napster moment yet [...]

The idea of Robot Robot & Hwang is to experiment with computers and legal code to disrupt the norms of the industry and give way to something better and more innovative. I have in mind a different approach that brings the kind of big-data analysis we see being applied elsewhere to the law. An example of this is a company called Lex Machina, which does data mining on judges’ records and makes quantitative predictions about what they will do in the future. That sort of stuff is really powerful. It takes the responsibilities and talents attributed to lawyers and gives them to someone else as well. Also, the way forms are done now tend to be pretty flat–with online services you’re mostly just paying for PDF documents, but if it’s, say, a municipal complaint, you could add a tool to file it directly, in a really a simple way.

For more information, please see the complete article.

Please join me in congratulating Tim!

Gorham on State Courts, E-Filing, and Diffusion of Innovation

Ursula Gorham, JD, MLS, MPM, of the University of Maryland College of Information Studies, will present a paper entitled State Courts, E-Filing, and Diffusion of Innovation, at dg.o 2012: The 13th Annual International Conference on Digital Government Research, to be held 4-7 June 2012 at the University of Maryland, College Park, in College Park, Maryland, USA.

Here is the abstract:

Despite the widely touted benefits of electronic filing (“e-filing”), state courts continue to lag behind their federal counterparts and remain at various stages of evaluation, development, and implementation of e-filing systems. A number of reasons for lack of progress – e.g., concerns regarding privacy, limited funding, the judiciary’s lack of awareness of the benefits of e-filing – have been suggested. This paper, building upon these suggestions, proposes a framework of analysis based upon a theory of innovation and diffusion, seeking to identify those factors that contribute to state courts’ adoption of e-filing. The proposed framework of analysis is one avenue for exploring the underlying reasons for sluggish progress in this area, and this exploration will pave the way for a more comprehensive assessment of state courts’ current e-filing initiatives, the challenges that state courts face as they transition to e-filing, and the policies that can be adopted to overcome these challenges.

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

Thanks to Ms. Gorham for granting permission to post the abstract.

Call for Presentations: LawTechCamp London 2012

Presentation proposals — with submission deadline of 25 May 2012 — are invited 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.

Click here to submit a presentation proposal.

Here is a description of the event:

lawTechCamp is a BarCamp-style community UnConference for new media and technology enthusiasts and legal professionals including bloggers, twitters, legal-technology lawyers, social networkers, and those curious about new media and the law. Anyone with an interest in technology, law, and innovation–especially in the wake of UK deregulation–will want to attend.

Building off the strength of lawTechCamp Toronto – LawTechCamp London will be the first such event held in outside of North America.

lawTechCamp is not just for lawyers. If you are interested in the intersection of law and technology, such as legal issues facing startups, access to justice issues, or someone just interested in technology or law, then please join us – and bring a friend or colleague.

This event is casual, with active participation between the audience and the workshop presenters and event-attendees. Attendance is free, but registration is required.

The keynote speaker will be Professor Dr. Richard Susskind.

This event is brought to you by the following organizers:

• 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 

LawTechCamp London 2012 is co-sponsored by Michigan State University College of Law, The University of Westminster, and The College of Law.

For more information, please see the LawTechCamp London 2012 Website, or the post at Computational Legal Studies.

HT Professor Dr. Daniel Martin Katz.

New on Slaw.ca: Indian Kanoon: Sushant Sinha on Innovation and Free Law in India

Dr. Sushant Sinha‘s free access to law service for India, Indian Kanoon, is the subject of my new, in-depth article on Slaw.ca, the Canadian legal blog.

The article provides a great deal of detailed information about Indian Kanoon, including information on technology and open source, users and usage, business models and sustainability, partnerships, product differentiation, advertising, Indian Kanoon‘s online forums, and Dr. Sinha’s innovative concept of “the thirst for law”: the idea, first expressed in Dr. Sinha’s recent VoxPopuLII post, that free access to law online stimulates the public’s demand for such access, in a virtuous circle.

The post also describes Indian Kanoon‘s new partnership with PRS Legislative Research, in which Indian Kanoon is adding to its content full text of the debates of the Parliament of India, which PRS will then use in providing legislative history and research services to members of India’s national and state parliaments. This partnership exemplifies how civil-society-based free-access-to-law services can function as “extensions” of e-Government, consistent with the vision set out by Robinson et al., in Government Data and the Invisible Hand.

I’m very grateful to Dr. Sinha for taking time for extensive interviews that provided the content of the article.

New on VoxPopuLII: Sinha on Indian Kanoon: The Genesis and the Legal Thirst

Dr. Sushant Sinha of Yahoo! India has posted Indian Kanoon: The Genesis and the Legal Thirst, on the VoxPopuLII Blog, published by the Legal Information Institute at Cornell University Law School.

In this post, Dr. Sinha describes the origins and development of Indian Kanoon, the free legal search engine for India, for which Dr. Sinha was recently named one of “18 Young Innovators under 35 in India” by MIT’s Technology Review India.

Indian Kanoon provides free online access to Indian statutes, judicial and administrative decisions, debates of India’s constituent assemblies, reports of the Indian Law Commission, and articles from selected law journals. Indian Kanoon also hosts several discussion forums, in which users can ask and receive responses to questions concerning substantive legal issues or Indian Kanoon‘s functionality.

In his post, Dr. Sinha identifies as the principal goal of Indian Kanoon the “empower[ment of] citizens” by enabling them to become informed about “their rights and privileges” under the law.

Dr. Sinha observes that the number of visitors to Indian Kanoon is extremely large and steadily rising; and that the average visitor to Indian Kanoon spends substantial time viewing each retrieved document. Dr. Sinha concludes that these data indicate a growing demand among the Indian people for access to the law — a demand he calls The Legal Thirst — and considers possible causes for this increasing demand.

Dr. Sinha suggests that two factors in particular — the provision of access to law free of charge, and improvements in search technology, including “forgiving” keyword search functionality and the ranking of results by relevance — are fueling the desire of the Indian public to read the full text of the laws that govern them.

Dr. Sinha’s post will be of interest to legal information systems developers, legal publishers, the ICT for development community, and all those interested in the free access to law movement.

IndianKanoon Founder Honored as a Top Innovator by MIT Technology Review

Dr. Sushant Sinha, creator of the free access to law service IndianKanoon, has been honored as one of India’s 18 top innovators, by MIT’s Technology Review, according to a post at rediff.com.

Click here, then click to slide number 18, to see the article.

The article states:

[Indian Kanoon] has been designed to provide the most relevant Indian laws and court judgments in response to a query. It enables people to quickly determine the standing law of the land on any issue and empowers them to seek justice.

The website has gained quick attention and is used by roughly half a million unique visitors and has more than two million page views every month.

With dual degree in computer science and engineering from Indian Institute of Technology, Madras, and PhD in the same discipline from University of Michigan, Sinha felt the need to generate awareness of laws among the citizens of India. In May 2007, he started developing the portal and finally launched it on 4 January 2008.

“Even when laws empower citizens in a large number of ways, a significant fraction of the population is completely ignorant of their rights and privileges. As a result, common people are afraid of going to the police and rarely go to court to seek justice. People continue to live under the fear of unknown laws and a corrupt police. I started the project as a way to enrich court judgments by linking them with laws and other references. The linking turned out to be so useful that I started building a search engine for Indian law. Indian Kanoon makes it simpler for people to access information on any law or judgment,” explains Sinha. [...]

Presently the Indian Kanoon hosts over 1.2 million documents. It is integrated with the Supreme Court of India, 22 High Courts, and 17 Tribunals to provide a real-time fresh judgments to the users. Sinha is now working on integrating the online channel further with all state laws and with different rules formed by government agencies. [...]

For more information, please see the article.

New on VoxPopuLII: Glassmeyer on Innovation & Collaboration in Legal Information Services

Sarah Glassmeyer of the Valparaiso University School of Law Library has posted The Loris in the Library, on the VoxPopuLII Blog, published by the Legal Information Institute at Cornell University Law School.

In this post, Ms. Glassmeyer addresses factors that may be inhibiting law libraries from adapting to the new digital information environment. Ms. Glassmeyer encourages law librarians to embrace technological and policy innovation — such as the Law.gov legal open government data movement — and to collaborate with publishers, computer scientists, and others on developing systems that improve legal information services.

This post may be of particular interest to law librarians, legal publishers, and developers of legal information systems.

Federal Register 2.0 Now Available

Federal Register 2.0 (FR 2.0) — a new online version of the Federal Register, featuring Web 2.0 functions enabling users to comment, plain language summaries of regulations, and access by subject — is now available.

Click here to access the FR 2.0 source code on Github. HT @bethnoveck and @govpulse.

Click here for a video describing the history of the Federal Register and the features of FR 2.0.

Click here for background information on FR 2.0.

Of particular interest to those interested in open government data efforts is that FR 2.0 appears to include features and functions that were originally developed as part of innovative nongovernmental erulemaking efforts, such as the University at Albany’s DeER (Deliberative E-Rulemaking) Project, the Princeton Center for Information Technology Policy‘s FedThread, the Cornell e-Rulemaking Initiative‘s Regulation Room, and WestEd‘s GovPulse. Some of GovPulse’s innovative Federal Register-related technology was developed as part of The Sunlight Foundation’s 2009 Apps for America Challenge. Click here for a video describing the Federal Register-related innovations developed through the Apps for America Challenge.

These projects arose because in 2009 the Office of the Federal Register and the U.S. Government Printing Office (GPO) began making the Federal Register available online in XML for free of charge bulk access on GPO’s FDsys. This free bulk access to legal information enabled nongovernmental developers to create innovative systems and tools for use in connection with that information. With FR 2.0, the U.S. federal government is reincorporating some of these innovative systems and tools, to enhance public access to the law and public participation in agency rulemaking and other aspects of federal public policy.

This kind of socially beneficial collaboration between government as data provider and civil society organizations as technology innovators is consistent with the model proposed by David Robinson et al. in their paper, Government Data and the Invisible Hand, 11 Yale Journal of Law and Technology 160-175 (2009) (Issue No. 2).

One statement in the video describing new features of FR 2.0 seems questionable. The video seems to suggest that the “Summary” field in each proposed or final rule is a feature new to FR 2.0. However, the “Summary” field appears for many years to have been a required field for proposed or final rules published in the Federal Register. See, e.g., Federal Register Document Drafting Handbook 1-6, 1-8 (1998), and this proposed rule from 1998. I’ve sent an email to the Office of the Federal Register asking for clarification of this point; I’ll post any response I receive.

Mayer-Schönberger on Obstacles to Innovation in Online Legal Information Markets

Professor Viktor Mayer-Schönberger of the National University of Singapore’s Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy has written an interesting post on obstacles to innovation in the markets for online legal information, entitled Venture Capital & Peer Production, at VoxPopuLII.

Professor Mayer-Schönberger argues that risk and cost factors, user preferences, and the relatively small size of the legal information market, all discourage innovation. Professor Mayer-Schönberger concludes by advocating open source peer production of new software for the legal information market, and identifying roles for users, software designers, and existing software tools in such production.