Proposals invited for lawTechCamp 2013

Proposals for sessions are invited for lawTechCamp 2013, “a BarCamp-style community UnConference for new media and technology enthusiasts and legal professionals,” to be held 8 June 2013 in Toronto, Canada.

lawTechCamp 2013 is being organized by Monica Goyal of MyLegalBriefcase, Mitch Kowalski, and Sapna Mahboobani of Sapna Law Professional Corporation.

Here are details on the session proposals:

LawTechCamp is all about you, the participants. We want the participants, to dictate what sessions are covered at lawTechCamp, and to present them. The only thing to remember is that topics should bridge technology and law in some way. This could mean technology that could help in the practice of law. Or legal issues that affect the development of technology.

Last year, we had a sessions on knowledge management, social media and the law, IP issues, and cloud computing.

If we receive more suggestions then rooms available for the event, we will put the suggestions to a vote. [...]

For more details, please see the event Website.

Click here for information on previous lawTechCamp events.

Service of Legal Documents via Social Media: Two U.S. Developments

Here are two recent items regarding service of legal documents via social media, in the context of U.S. law:

• Evan Brown, Esq., tells us that a U.S. federal district court has allowed service of documents via Facebook, in a case involving defendants located in India (FTC v. PCCare247 Inc., 2013 WL 841037 (S.D.N.Y. March 7, 2013))
• The Wall Street Journal’s Law Blog tells us of a new Texas bill that would allow service of citation [i.e., summons] by social media (text of the bill, H. B. 1989)

8 March: ReInventLaw Silicon Valley 2013 Conference

ReInventLaw Silicon Valley 2013: a conference on “technology, innovation, and entrepreneurship in the legal services industry,” is being held 8 March 2013, in Mountain View, California, USA.

The Twitter hashtag for the event is #reinventlaw

Click here for archived Twitter tweets from ReInventLaw Silicon Valley 2013, in .csv format.

The speakers for the event have also been announced.

Click here for the conference schedule.

The event is sponsored by The ReInvent Law Laboratory at Michigan State University College of Law and is organized by the Reinvent Law Lab‘s co-directors, Professor Dr. Daniel Martin Katz and Professor Renee Newman Knake.

Admission is free.

Videos of conference presentations will be available at ReInventLawChannel on or after 1 April 2013.

For posts and links related to the conference please see the comments to this post.

For more information, please see the event’s Website.

Anders: When Lawyers and Judges Must Sever Ties on Social Media

Kelly Lynn Anders, JD has published Ethical Exits: When Lawyers and Judges Must Sever Ties on Social Media, Charleston Law Review, Vol. 7, 187-205 (2012-2013).

Here is the abstract:

This article addresses the very recent trend of requiring lawyers and judges to sever ties on social media, the professional implications of doing so, relevant rules governing judicial and attorney conduct, and a discussion of “best practices” for lawyers and judges to follow when social media connections must be broken. Recent opinions from states that have issued social media directives in this area will also be discussed, along with a brief overview of three of the most commonly used social media sites at the time of the publication of this article – Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter.

Through this discussion and analysis, one theme will continue to resurface – the increasingly pressing need for guidance and clarity in the MRPC and M[C]JC so that expectations involving social media connections will be clear, uniform, and much easier to manage for lawyers, judges, and anyone with whom they may communicate, either professionally or personally. Such clear-cut guidance would also decrease the need for severing ties that should not have been formed in the first place, thereby also serving to contribute to the preservation of solid and favorable reputations of all jurists and counselors in an increasingly virtual world.

Call for Papers: LVI 2013: Law via the Internet Conference

The call for papers and presentation proposals has been issued for LVI 2013: Law via the Internet Conference, to be held 26-27 September 2013 on the Channel Island of Jersey.

The conference Website does not seem to state the deadline for submitting papers or proposals. If you know the submission deadline, please feel free to tell us in the comments to this post.

[UPDATE 11 February 2013: The conference organizers now say the submission deadline is 31 March 2013.]

Papers are invited on the topics covered by any of the seven tracks in which the conference program is divided:

• E-Learning: distance, blended, open, mobile, gaming, MOOCing and more?
• Online legal information – starting from scratch
• Legal knowledge in the age of the semantic web
• Communicating our work: journals, blogs and other ways of publishing about open access
• Privacy v open government in legal publishing
• Emerging patterns of information access and usage
• Technological development and free access to law

The conference Twitter account is @JerseyLVI2013 and the conference hashtag is #lvi2013

For details about the tracks, please see the track Websites.

For more details about the conference, please see the conference Website.

Registration Open for ReInventLaw Silicon Valley 2013 Legal Technology & Innovation Conference

Registration is now open for ReInventLaw Silicon Valley 2013: a conference on “technology, innovation, and entrepreneurship in the legal services industry,” to be held 8 March 2013, in Mountain View, California, USA.

The Twitter hashtag for the event is #reinventlaw

The speakers for the event have also been announced.

The event is sponsored by The ReInvent Law Laboratory at Michigan State University College of Law and is organized by the Reinvent Law Lab‘s co-directors, Professor Dr. Daniel Martin Katz and Professor Renee Newman Knake.

Admission is free.

The event description says that “anyone interested in the future of law or technology or entrepreneurship will want to participate. Come hear about the innovative ideas generated by the highly-engaging atmosphere of the event!”

For more information, please see the event’s Website.

Justia launches a Free Law discussion group on Google+

Tim Stanley of Justia has started a new Free Law discussion group on Google+.

Recent topics have included Courtney Minick’s post about the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals’ decision to begin self-publishing its opinions online.

ReinventLaw Silicon Valley 2013: Legal Technology Unconference

ReInventLaw Silicon Valley 2013: an unconference on “law, technology, social media, innovation, and entrepreneurship,” will be held 8 March 2013, in Mountain View, California, USA.

The event is sponsored by The ReInvent Law Laboratory at Michigan State University College of Law and is organized by the Reinvent Law Lab‘s co-directors, Professor Dr. Daniel Martin Katz and Professor Renee Newman Knake.

Admission is free.

The event description says that “anyone interested in the future of law or technology or entrepreneurship will want to participate. Come hear about the innovative ideas generated by the highly-engaging atmosphere of the event!”

For more information, please see the event’s Website.

On Participedia: Iceland’s Crowdsourced Constitutional Drafting Process

Alexander Kok and others have posted Icelandic Constitutional Council 2011, on Participedia, the open global knowledge community for researchers and practitioners in the field of democratic innovation and public engagement.

This page describes the processes by which Iceland has drafted a new national constitution, and the institutions involved in those processes. The page includes a helpful diagram of the drafting process.

Those processes are notable in part because they involved crowdsourcing the drafting of parts of the constitution by means of online social media.

The page also includes links to several sources that describe or analyze these drafting processes.

For more information, please see the complete page.

Disclosure: I contribute to Participedia.

Request for Proposals, July 6, 2012 Deadline: Social Media in Rulemaking: ACUS

A request for proposals (RFP) — with submission deadline of 6 July 2012 — has been posted by the Administrative Conference of the United States (ACUS) for “a consultant to undertake a research project that will consider legal and policy issues raised by agency use of social media to support rulemaking activities.”

According to the RFP here is the project description:

The Conference seeks to study various policy and legal issues agencies face when using social media in rulemaking. The goal of the project is to identify relevant issues, define applicable legal and policy constraints on agency action, resolve legal uncertainty to the greatest extent possible, and encourage agencies to find innovative ways to use social media to facilitate broader, more meaningful public participation in rulemaking activities. [...]

For more information, please see the complete RFP.

HT @garvinfo.