Updated as of May 2013: Legal Informatics Conference Calendar

The legal informatics conference calendar has now been updated.

The calendar lists primarily scholarly conferences that focus on legal information systems, legal communication, legal/forensic linguistics, or egovernment (as applied to legal information), or that are known to welcome papers on those topics. The calendar also lists legal hackathons and other legal hacking events.

Click here for a list of events just added to the calendar.

If you know of events or other information that should be on the calendar but are not; or if you spot errors in the calendar, I’d be grateful if you would please share that information in the comments to this post.

Updated as of March 2013: Legal Informatics Conference Calendar

The legal informatics conference calendar has now been updated.

The calendar lists primarily scholarly conferences that focus on legal information systems, legal communication, legal/forensic linguistics, or egovernment (as applied to legal information), or that are known to welcome papers on those topics. The calendar also lists legal hackathons and other legal hacking events.

Click here for a list of events just added to the calendar.

If you know of events or other information that should be on the calendar but are not; or if you spot errors in the calendar, I’d be grateful if you would please share that information in the comments to this post.

Legal Informatics Projects Featured at Open Data Day DC 2013

The program for Open Data Day DC 2013, also called Open Data Day 2013 Hackathon – DC Metro — to be held 23 February 2013 in Washington, DC, USA — includes at least four legal informatics projects:

• Contract/Procurement Visualization Sprint (Visualizing.org) [...]
• Open DC Zoning Data (@andrewsalzberg) [...]
• Parse dates and legal citations from RECAP documents [...]
• Discover Bill Pedigree

The Twitter hashtags for the event appear to be #opendataday #dc

Updates about the Open Data Day DC 2013 activities are available on the event’s hackpad.

If you know of other legal informatics projects to be discussed at Open Data Day DC 2013, please mention them in the comments.

Information about other legal hacking events appears here and here.

HT @JoshData

20-21 January Legal Hackathon re: Trademark Technology, Silicon Valley

Tim Hwang tells us that there will be a legal hackathon focusing on trademark technology, on 20-21 January 2013, in Mountain View, California, USA, sponsored by AttorneyFee.

The Twitter hashtag for the event is #TMHacks

Here is a description of the event:

AttorneyFee is holding its first hackathon ever, and we want you to join us! The event will kick off at 10:00 AM on January 20th and go till the next day at 5:00 PM. Copious amounts of caffeine, pizza, and beer will be provided. Come with a team, or come on your own and join a team. Come with an idea to work on, or join our ideation session in the morning to develop an idea. At the conclusion of the event each team will present their project, and the coolest project will win some swag.

The focus of the hackathon will be trademarks. Why trademarks, you ask? We recently finished building three super valuable APIs for trademarks that we hope will enable more open innovation in the space: (i) the AF TM applications API, (ii) the AF TM attorneys API, and (iii) the AF TM logos API. Together, these three APIs should enable devs to build a slew of cool new apps to disrupt the trademark industry. [...]

For more details, please see the complete announcement.

HT Tim Hwang

Updated as of January 2013: Legal Informatics Conference Calendar

The legal informatics conference calendar has now been updated.

The calendar lists primarily scholarly conferences that focus on legal information systems, legal communication, legal/forensic linguistics, or egovernment (as applied to legal information), or that are known to welcome papers on those topics. The calendar also lists legal hackathons and other legal hacking events.

Click here for a list of events just added to the calendar.

If you know of events or other information that should be on the calendar but are not; or if you spot errors in the calendar, I’d be grateful if you would please share that information in the comments to this post.

Law Hack Camp London postponed until April

Amanda Bancroft announced today that the legal hacking event Law Hack Camp in London has been postponed until April 2013.

Bancroft says she will announce precise dates and other details shortly.

The Law Hack Camp Website is at http://lawhackcamp.com/ and its Twitter handle is @LawHackCamp.

HT @_millymoo

Call for Papers: Law Hack Camp, Legal Hackathon, London, 26-27 January 2013

[NOTE: Law Hack Camp has been postponed until April, @_millymoo announced on 6 January 2013.]

A call for papers — with submission deadline of 25 December 2012 — has been issued for Law Hack Camp, a legal hackathon to be held 26-27 January 2013, London, England, UK.

The event is being organized by Amanda Bancroft and Jon Harman.

The Twitter hashtag for the event is #lawhackcamp

The Twitter account for the event is @lawhackcamp

For more details, please see the conference Website and the contact information listed there, or contact the organizers.

Click here for information on other recent legal hacking events.

HT @_millymoo

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.

Posts and Resources for Open Legislation Hackathon 2012, Victoria, BC

Here are resources related to the Open Legislation Hackathon 2012, held 2 June 2012, at Queen’s Printer British Columbia, in Victoria, British Columbia, Canada.

The event was sponsored by “the Queen’s Printers Association of Canada (QPAC) and the Open Data Society of BC.”

Click here for archived tweets from the event (in .csv format). The Twitter hashtag for the event is #QPhack.

Click here for a spreadsheet describing projects worked on during the event (scroll to the projects with Timestamp of 6/2/2012).

The projects worked on at the event that involved legal data include the following:

• LexView — developed by Lexum — “an end-user interface for publishing large structured documents on the web.”
• You Rule — developed by Herb Lainchbury — “an application that monitors legislation and let’s you know what’s changed. It lists each change as a separate page so that citizens can view, rate and comment on the change.”
• Law Server — developed by Kevin McArthur — “[a] tool for developers [that] uses a standard Uniform Resource Locator (URL) schema for legislative data, and allows the easy translation into different data formats.”

Here are posts about the event that I’ve been able to identify:

• Loren Mullane’s post: Queen’s Printers Continue to Innovate
• Herb Lainchbury’s post: QP Hackathon Summary
• DataBC’s post before the event: Legislation Hackathon in Victoria June 2nd

Click here for upcoming legal hacking events.

On Twitter, the hashtags for legal hacking news are #legalhack and #legalhacks.

June 2: Open Legislation Hackathon, Victoria, BC

An Open Legislation Hackathon will be held 2 June 2012, at Queen’s Printer British Columbia, in Victoria, British Columbia, Canada, according to this announcement.

According to the announcement, the event is sponsored by “the Queen’s Printers Association of Canada (QPAC) and the Open Data Society of BC.”

Here is the description of the event:

It’s a chance to build mobile or online applications using legislative data from across the provinces of Canada.[...]

The goal is to share the experience, findings, and difficulties of creating online apps based on legislative data published by the different Queen’s Printers of Canada. Present your apps and experience to representatives of the annual QPAC conference from across Canada! Your app and presentation may change the way other provinces look at legislative data, online licensing and open data policies!

What are we building?

Anything you like! It would be great if it uses legislative data. We want to see what you can come up with! Focus on multiple jurisdictions, or just one.

For more information, please see the announcement.

HT @kimnayyer and @ColinLaChance.

Click here for other upcoming legal hacking events.