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.

Legal Technology and Information Systems at NLADA 2011

Slides and materials have been posted for several presentations on legal technology or legal information systems, given at NLADA 2011: The National Legal Aid and Defender Association Annual Conference, held 7-10 December 2011 in Washington, DC, USA.

The conference theme was “Innovations in Civil Legal Services.”

Here are the legal technologies or information systems I’ve identified in the slides or materials:

• Illinois Legal Aid app, which provides “[p]lain language legal information includ[ing] FAQs, step-by-step instructions and referrals to helpful organizations,” by Illinois Legal Aid;
• Illinois Pro Bono app, which offers “primers on Illinois law, volunteer opportunity search, and calendar of upcoming legal events, including MCLE trainings,” for lawyers who want to provide pro bono legal services, by Illinois Legal Aid;
• “[A]n interactive online decision tree, using the A2J [Author] software… to help litigants, practitioners and judges parse” the Uniform Child Custody Jurisdiction and Enforcement Act, by the DC Family Court Self Help Center;
• Electronic document management system and mobile access to documents and data, by Memphis Area Legal Services, Inc.;
• Data analysis to “identify unmet” client needs, … “gauge the effectiveness of specific legal strategies,” and “measure our progress toward achieving our existing strategic goals,” by Legal Aid Society of Cleveland;
• Client intake decision guides, by Legal Assistance Foundation of Metropolitan Chicago;
• Online county-based legal self-help centers [such as the center for Will County], by Illinois Legal Aid Online;
• LiveHelp (e.g., go to http://www.illinoislegalaid.org/, and click on “LiveHelp”), “an instant messaging service that provides remote navigation assistance to website users seeking legal information,” by Illinois Legal Aid Online.
• AyudaLegalIL.org, an online Spanish-language legal aid service, which “integrate[s] an automatic translation component into the website’s content management system with Google Translate API,” with translations reviewed and correction by a human “native Spanish-speaker”, by Illinois Legal Aid Online.

Many of these technologies or systems were developed in part with funds from the Legal Services Corporation‘s Technology Initiative Grants (TIG) program.

McMillan: Eight Rules of E-Filing

James E. McMillan of the National Center for State Courts has begun a new series of posts on court e-filing systems, entitled Eight Rules of E-Filing, at Court Technology Bulletin.

Mr. McMillan explains that in many U.S. court systems, “physical case files” continue to play a prominent role; and where document filing has been automated, it is often not integrated with other court information systems, such as those for “registry/docket (historical event record), participants, and scheduling /task control.”

In this series of posts, Mr. McMillan explains the benefits of integrating “[e]-filing, document, and case management functionality,” and offers best practices for e-filing systems.

Legal Informatics Papers @ ECEG 2011

The following legal informatics papers were presented at ECEG 2011: The 11th European Conference on eGovernment, held 16-17 June 2011, at the University of Ljubljana Faculty of Administration, in Ljubljana, Slovenia. (If you know of other legal informatics papers presented at the conference, please feel free to identify them in the comments; click here for the abstracts of most of the conference papers):

Mila Gascó and Carlos E Jiménez, Interoperability in the Justice Field: Variables That Affect Implementation. Abstract:

Several public institutions and agencies around the world have designed and implemented important electronic government strategies and plans. This has not been the case in the justice field. However, in the last very few years, the growing demand for efficient judicial systems has sped up the adoption of information and communication technologies (ICT) aimed at improving access to justice, increasing cooperation between legal authorities and strengthening the justice system itself. As in other areas, the new technologies are becoming a key tool in order to achieve these goals. That is so because information systems contribute to homogenize tasks and activities, to obtain management indicators and to make telematic connections with other public administrations and registers, with professionals and judicial institutions and with citizens. One of the more important aspects of this technological modernization has to do with interoperability since it guarantees the harmonic and cohesive functioning of different existing systems, processes, and applications that, in the justice field, are many as a result of the big variety of actors that are involved: judicial institutions but, also, different public administrations, such as those responsible of police forces, and law professionals. Taken this context into account, this paper is the result of an empirical research that was conducted during 2010 in the Generalitat de Catalunya (Autonomous Government of Catalonia) with regard to the e-government project “e-Justícia.cat”, an electronic justice initiative. In particular, the research was aimed at finding what factors conditioned the implementation of the interoperability modules of the project. In this respect, the paper presents the experience of GRP (management of police requests) and analyzes those variables that have been key in the implementation process in order to identify common patterns that may guide future interventions and projects in a field that is characterized by specific attributes that hinder technology adoption.

Hille Hinsberg, e-Participation Building Blocks in Estonia. Summary:

• Discusses “ID cards [...] enabling both electronic authentication and digital signing; [...] government online registers…; Estonia’s internet voting infrastructure,” and www.osale.ee, “[t]he Estonian Government’s central participation portal”:

www.osale.ee (‘osale’ means ‘participate’ in Estonian) was launched in 2007, allowing interest groups and individuals to comment on draft policy documents, launch their own ideas and initiatives for new legislation and amendments, and submit petitions. Other users can vote and comment on these proposals. Then the proposal is forwarded to the relevant government department, which in turn posts an answer, explaining what action was or was not taken and why. Currently, e-participation is about to be embedded in the policy-making framework to fulfill its potential for empowering citizens. Osale.ee consultations have been integrated with government’s policy preparation portal, where the full cycle of legal acts and policies becomes accessible for wider audience. Assisted by the new tool EIS, all interested groups and individuals can follow the policy-making process and provide comments throughout the stages, until the act is presented to the government session.

Bernhard Horn, Gerald Fischer, Roman Trabitsch and Thomas Grechenig, An Outline of the Technical Requirements on Governmental Electronic Record Systems Derived from the European Legal Environment. Abstract:

In modern e-government administrations, regulatory documents are not only drafted using computer tools but are increasingly managed using Electronic Record Systems (ERS). Such tools mean that coordination and administrative procedures do not only have to occur via e-mail or similar technologies. To execute the next administrational step using traditional methods, each officer has to know the inner organisational workflow and therefore those clerks responsible for performing the next administrational step to be able to forward the record to the correct person. Though till now this way of working has been quite common in many official organisations, there are a considerable number of software products available, which implement ERS, to assist performing administrative procedures electronically. When an officer has finished his respective process step, such a system automatically forwards the documents to the next responsible person. Moreover if several clerks have to perform a step in parallel, it is not necessary to copy the whole file several times but only to grant appropriate access permissions to the documents. Thus at any moment, everyone has the record in its latest version. Furthermore the whole administrative act can be tracked and monitored. It is important to remember however that within the European Union a couple of regulatory rules have to be obeyed when implementing and using such ERS. The providers of such systems as well as the authority using them are responsible for ensuring legal conformity. The aim of this paper is to give a brief overview of the applicable European regulations concerning ERS for responsible stakeholders, such as IT-system designers and providers, administration chiefs, or researchers in the field of e-government.

Marijn Plomp and Jan Grijpink, Combating Identity Fraud in the Public Domain: Information Strategies for Healthcare and Criminal Justice. Abstract:

[...] We introduce the theoretical framework of Chaincomputerisation that explains large-scale chain co-operation as an answer to a dominant chain problem. Identity fraud proves to be the dominant chain problem in many chain co-operation situations. Therefore, our main research question is: what is a successful information strategy to combat identity fraud in the large-scale processes that constitute the public domain? Next, we demonstrate the problem of identity fraud using the example of the Dutch criminal justice chain, showing that a certain chain communication system enables to stop identity fraud using forensic biometrics. The second example is about healthcare. In the Netherlands, the government is introducing a national system of medical information exchange based on the national personal number as the sole identifier for recognition and linking. We show that people sometimes have interest in using somebody else’s number, to be treated in cases (s)he is not insured. [...] The examples are taken from our chain analysis programme that has an exploratory, empirical character. A chain analysis tests empirical findings against the theoretical framework of Chaincomputerisation, to derive a suitable chain-specific information strategy. We use this novel approach which is specifically tailored to the peculiarities of large-scale situations, as opposed to the small-scale approach usually employed in these cases. The traditional authentication procedures do not take into account ‘wrong person’ identity fraud that causes fraud surreptitiously spreading from chain to chain. Therefore, in both cases, the problem of identity fraud presents a threat to the chain co-operation that has to be tackled with a large-scale approach and with person-oriented security procedures and instruments that are indeed able to prevent identity fraud from happening undetected. It is precisely this approach and this type of procedures and instruments that are explained here. [...] Finally, we argue that an information strategy using basic, but chain-specific information systems, combined with random identity verification procedures enable combating identity fraud.

Velicogna et al. on e-Justice in France: The e-Barreau Experience

Marco Velicogna of IRSIG‐CNR, and Antoine Errera and Stéphane Derlange, both of Tribunal administratif de Paris, have published e-Justice in France: The e-Barreau Experience, Utrecht Law Review, 7(1), 163-187 (2011). Here is the abstract:

Recent field research projects in the justice sector have shown how the development of e-justice entails much more than developing, installing and connecting technological devices or providing normative recognition to the use of the digital medium instead of the traditional one for the exchange of documents. This article presents an exploratory case-study describing the development of an e-filing and document-exchange system between lawyers and ordinary courts in the French justice administration. As it soon became apparent, the real challenge did not lie in the search, assembly and manufacture of technological tools, but in the creation of the governance net of relevant organizational actors that was needed to successfully sustain and implement the innovation. It concerned looking for acceptable compromises as to what could be done and how. The challenge was also to find ways to motivate users to actively participate in the creation of the new service which could not work without them. Furthermore, external and somewhat unforeseeable events also played a relevant role in defining choices, the tempo and the possibilities for the success of the system’s design and implementation.

HT Ronald van den Hoogen.

Francesconi, Marchetti, Pietramala, & Spinosa on A URN Standard for Legal Document Ontology: A Best Practice in the Italian Senate

Professor Dr. Enrico Francesconi of Università degli Studi di Firenze Dipartimento di Sistemi e Informatica and ITTIG/CNR; Carlo Marchetti and Remigio Pietramala of The Senate of the Republic, Italy; and Pierluigi Spinosa of ITTIG-CNR, have published A URN Standard for Legal Document Ontology: A Best Practice in the Italian Senate, in LOAIT 2010: Proceedings of the 4th Workshop on Legal Ontologies and Artificial Intelligence Techniques, European University Institute, Fiesole, Florence, Italy, July 7th, 2010, at 53-68 (Enrico Francesconi, Simonetta Montemagni, Piercarlo Rossi, and Daniela Tiscornia eds., 2010). Here is the abstract:

Uniform Resource Names (URNs) are conceived by the Internet community for providing unambiguous and lasting identifiers of network resources, independently from their physical locations, availability and actual publication. In this paper a proposal of a URN schema for identifying sources of law at international level is presented. Moreover an implementation of such schema at the Italian Senate is shown.

Click here for more information on URN:LEX.

McMillan on Electronic Documents: Benefits & Potential Pitfalls

James McMillan of the National Center for State Courts has published Electronic Documents: Benefits and Potential Pitfalls, in Future Trends in State Courts 2010, p. 180-184.

The article discusses the costs and benefits of “paper-on-demand” (POD) electronic document management systems for courts; proprietary versus open standards; word processing formats; PDF; other image-based formats; XML; and NIEM, the National Information Exchange Model, an important XML interchange standard for U.S. government entities.

Here is a summary:

The severe budget cutbacks generated by the recession have been a driving incentive for courts to explore the merits of converting to a “paper-on-demand” (POD) electronic environment. For example, an ROI (return on investment) study in Manatee County, Florida, revealed a cost saving of almost $1,000,000 based on e-filing their 2,321,252 documents per year (Shore, Singer, and Pettijohn, 2009).

In POD courts, documents are e-filed to the court or scanned into the system upon receipt. This electronically stored document is accepted as the original, while the paper documents can be returned to the filer. In addition, multiple users can view documents from their workstations simultaneously. This desirable working environment is being sought by courts throughout the country. King County (Washington), Oregon, Missouri, Colorado, and Orange County (California) have been trendsetters in POD efforts, while large projects are underway in Iowa, Massachusetts, and Alabama, just to name a few. [...]

Courts must be careful in their electronic document decisions. Some vendors may try to lock them into proprietary file formats to preserve their application and licensing revenue. Courts should attempt to leverage standards-based electronic file formats when possible.

Not all court users will be comfortable or proficient with certain electronic document formats. Some formats may have the buy in from the bench or the bar, but many may not be easily or readily available to those in court without lawyers, or may require more firsthand support than the courts or vendors are prepared to provide. Take into account these access considerations before settling into a particular format/solution.

The POD court is an ideal worth striving for; however, there is still more work to be done so that the word-processing applications can support the needs of the justice system. It is possible to create NIEM-compliant justice-document applications today with common word-processing tools and some additional programming. Therefore, courts should be selective in these efforts due to the cost of development. And, it is hoped, that in the near future software tools will be available that are integrated into our common applications.

Mokanov on Current Projects at LexUM

Ivan Mokanov of LexUM, gave a presentation entitled Current Projects at LexUM (scroll down), at the Joint Study Institute 2010, held 20-23 June 2010, in Montréal, Québec, Canada. Here is the abstract:

The presentation will focus on two very recent LexUM projects:

Enterprise search for CLEBC: After modernizing the Continuing Legal Education Society of British Columbia’s (CLEBC) publication platform for its online manuals, LexUM is now working to implement an enterprise search infrastructure based on its ELIIsa search engine for all of CLEBC’s online resources. This infrastructure will offer advanced search functions for CLEBC’s practice manuals, practice notes, case digests, course materials, webcast archive and online store.

Monitoring system for CPAC: The Canadian Partnership Against Cancer is an independent organization accelerating action on cancer control across Canada. LexUM is currently developing an online document monitoring and management mechanism in order to assist CPAC’s portal team in monitoring online policy and legislative information relevant to the fight against cancer in Canada. LexUM is also designing advanced management interfaces to enable the portal team to update its prevention policy database.

Hilhorst & van Engers on E-dossier at the Dutch Council of State: Design, Implementation and Lessons Learned

Dr. Richard Hilhorst of Raad van State and Professor Dr. Tom van Engers of the Leibniz Center for Law at the University of Amsterdam, have published E-dossier at the Dutch Council of State: Design, Implementation and Lessons Learned, in ICT4JUSTICE 2009: Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference on ICT Solutions for Justice, Skopje, FYR Macedonia, September 24, 2009 13-32 (George Eleftherakis and Tom van Engers eds., 2009).

Here is the abstract of the paper:

Since the eighties of last centuries many developments in information science and artificial intelligence have influenced legal practice. These changes are for example visible in the way case decisions are distributed, i.e. by means of digital publishing, using portal technology and the extensive use of legal content management techniques that have improved access to and availability of case decisions. Artificial Intelligence applied to the legal domain (AI&Law), a research field potentially very important for legal practice including eGovernment, has lead to a more commonly use of legal expert systems and more recently an interest in developing representation techniques for automated argumentation support and more generally legal reasoning. However despite the effort of many researchers in this field only a few actually build argumentation support systems. Even fewer researchers actually conduct empirical research aimed at support lawyers and judges in practical situations. This is a pity since empirical research is a requisite if we aim at building systems that are to support lawyers and judges in their daily practice. Furthermore interesting developments are going on in different legal institutions, developments that bring the application of scientific results much closer. In this paper we focus on describing an example of these developments, i.e. the development of a system for creating and handling electronic dossiers within the Dutch Council of State (in Dutch: Raad van State).