Lexum Launches Cloud-Based Tribunal Decision Service

Lexum, the legal technology firm that developed the Canadian Legal Information Institute (CanLII), has introduced Decisia, a new cloud-based service for managing decisions of courts and other tribunals.

According to the description of the service, Decisia includes templates and forms enabling standardization of frequently produced types of decisions.

Click here for videos describing Decisia.

Poulin on a Survey of Users of Lexum’s Supreme Court of Canada Decisions Website

Professor Dr. Daniel Poulin of Université de Montréal Faculté de Droit and Lexum has published results of a recent survey of users of Lexum’s Supreme Court of Canada decisions Website: Surprising Survey Results, at Slaw.ca.

(Click here to visit the Supreme Court of Canada decisions Website.)

The results include the following:

• users “are less eager to access legal content on mobile platforms than Lexum had initially assumed”;
• users’ “appetite for social web-related services appears much more limited than anticipated”;
• CanLII is users’ “favorite web site when looking for legal information”;
• French-speaking users’ preferences and behavior differ in several respects from those of English-speaking users:

French speakers care more for the Supreme Court of Canada’s press releases than their English speaking equivalents (72% of French respondents say they consult them v. 49% of the English respondents). French speaking respondents are also three times more likely to appreciate SMS as a way to be informed of the arrival of new decisions on the Lexum site (11% v. 4%).

Proof that English and French minds don’t think alike, the approaches taken to find a case varies according to the language of the respondent. English respondents are especially fond of searching by case name where their French peers prefer using the reference to the official report. English users also seem more familiar with neutral citations than the French users.

The post also describes the survey methodology.

For more information, please see the complete post.

New on VoxPopuLII: Moncion on New Research About Legal Information Institutes

Isabelle Moncion of the Chair in Legal Information of the University of Montreal, and Lexum, has posted Building Sustainable LIIs – or Free Access to Law as Seen Through the Eyes of a Newbie, on the VoxPopuLII Blog, published by the Legal Information Institute at Cornell University Law School.

In this post, Ms. Moncion describes two IDRC-funded studies into the use and sustainability of legal information institutes — sites that offer free Internet access to the full text of primary legal information — in Asia, West Africa, and Southern Africa. The studies are being conducted by the Chair in Legal Information of the University of Montreal.

The first study addresses the use of, and potential demand for, legal information institutes in four West African countries: Burkina Faso, Niger, Senegal, and Togo. The second study concerns the sustainability of legal information institutes, in Burkina Faso, Niger, Mali, India, Indonesia, Hong Kong, the Philippines, Uganda, Kenya, and South Africa.

Ms. Moncion’s post discusses the methodology and summarizes preliminary findings of the studies.

This post will be of interest to advocates of access to justice and to government information, and to the legal publishing community, as well as to those who study information and communications technology for development (ICT4D).

[Editor's Note: The original version of this post contained an error. The original version of the post stated that the studies described in the post are being conducted by Lexum and the Chair in Legal Information of the University of Montreal. That information is incorrect. The studies described in the post are being conducted solely by the Chair in Legal Information of the University of Montreal. Lexum has no role in the studies. We regret the error. The post has been corrected as of 5 May 2011.]

New from Lexum: Online Municipal Law Platform: Oyez Oyez

Lexum, the Canadian legal technology firm and creator and publisher of CanLII, has introduced a new online service — Oyez Oyez — providing full text access to Canadian municipal laws (including by-laws, ordinances, and regulations), proceedings of council meetings, and other municipal government documents.

Oyez Oyez is also available as an online publishing platform for municipal governments. To date, the municipalities of Saint-Adèle and Sainte-Catherine are participating in the service.

Click here for a video demonstrating Oyez Oyez.

Click here for Ivan Mokanov’s recent post about Oyez Oyez at Slaw.ca, the Canadian legal blog.

“Accessing Legal Information” Roundtable @ A2K Global Academy Workshop

A report on the roundtable on Accessing Legal Information, at the Access to Knowledge Global Academy Workshop, held 18-19 January 2011 at the University of Cape Town in Cape Town, South Africa, has been posted by Jake Gardener at the Yale Information Society Project.

According to the report, the panelists were Mariya Badeva-Bright, Tom Bruce, Daniel Poulin, Ivan Mokanov, Isabelle Moncion, and Darrel Pink.

The panelists discussed topics including:

• The Free Access to Law Movement;
• LexUM‘s work with JuriBurkina and JuriNiger;
• The factors influencing the recent increase in access to legal information in West Africa;
• Measures for evaluating the effectiveness of free access to law initiatives;
• the African Legal Information Institute (African LII);
• the sustainability of free access to law initiatives;
• the relationship between access to legal information, and democracy and the rule of law; and
• “the public interest in making legal information easily accessible to everybody.”

For more information, please see the entire report.

Employment Opportunity: President, Canadian Legal Information Institute (CanLII)

Canadian Legal Information Institute (CanLII) seeks applicants for the position of President. The agent for the search is Odgers Berndtson. Here is the relevant portion of the position announcement:

“…CanLII is the country’s foremost provider of free-access legal information. A non-profit created in 2001 by the Federation of Law Societies of Canada, its database boasts over a million legal documents, including superior court decisions and jurisdictional legislation. But the real work is just beginning and CanLII is in need of a leader to spearhead its growth. And that’s where you come in.

“In the pivotal role of President, you will develop the roadmap this organization will use to drive the ‘Free Access to Law Movement’ to new heights via the Internet platform. Part strategist, part tactician, you will deliver an innovative change management plan designed to fill the void in public access to Canadian legal information. Your ability to foster productive, trusting Board and stakeholder relationships will be a vital part of the big picture.

“Oversight of CanLII’s operation requires a bilingual, Internet-savvy, entrepreneurial executive at the helm. Broad-based legal knowledge and legal industry credibility is essential, as is your expertise in consulting, communication, and translating technical solutions into compelling opportunities. This is all underwritten by your genuine affinity for the ‘Free Access to Law Movement,’ for which you will travel domestically and internationally to advocate.

“…For further information please contact Angela Colizza in our Ottawa office at (613) 742-3203 or angela.colizza@odgersberndtson.ca.”

Click here for the complete position announcement.

HT @EJWalters.

New Report: Free Access to Law: Is It Here to Stay? Environmental Scan Report

A new report on the free access to law movement, entitled Free Access to Law: Is It Here to Stay? Environmental Scan Report (2010) [report URL updated 7 March 2011], has been published by a research team including the following members:

• Project Director – LexUM: Ivan Mokanov
• Director of LexUM: Daniel Poulin
• Research Coordinator – LexUM: Isabelle Moncion
• Research Coordinator – SAFLII: Mariya Bedeva-Bright
• Research Coordinator – CIS: Rebecca Schild
• Free Access To Law Consultant: Tom Bruce
• Local Researcher – Hong Kong: Tao Zhongyi
• Local Researcher – India: Prashant Iyengar
• Local Researcher – Indonesia: Aria Suyudi
• Local Researcher – Kenya: Esther Nyaiyaki Onchana
• Local Researcher – Philippines: Michael Vernon Guerrero Mendiola
• Local Researcher – Uganda: Robert Kirunda

The report was funded in part from a grant from IDRC: International Development Research Centre.

Here is the report’s introduction:

[1] The Environmental Scans are the first component of the “Free Access to Law – Is it Here to Stay” global study on the sustainability of FAL initiatives.

[2] The overall goal of this research is to respond to a need to study what free access to law initiatives do and how they do it. This will lead to an understanding of the effects FAL initiatives have on society and to an exploration of the factors determining their sustainability. The general hypothesis is that success leads to sustainability. That is, if the free access to law initiative is successful, it will have greater chances of securing funds and ensuring sustainability.

[3] The project covers the following regions: (1) Southern and Eastern Africa, (2) Western Africa, (3) Asia and the Pacific and (4) Canada. In order to complete a cross-case comparative analysis, countries have been selected to represent multiple legal traditions with FAL initiatives at various stages of development.

[4] In order to fully achieve its goals and specific objectives, the study will produce the following outputs:
• Collection of free access to law Case Studies, including a series of Environmental Scans
• Free access to law Best Practices Handbook
• Free access to law Online Library

[5] For the Environmental Scans, Local Researchers were asked to collect data according to the Environmental Scan Matrix (see Appendix 1) and draft a synopsis of the data, highlighting the trends, risks and opportunities for the field of online legal research publication in general and for the FAL initiative in particular. In sum, the researchers looked at how the individual indicators listed in the Environmental Scan Matrix work together to impact free access to law.

[6] The results of the Scans provided the local researchers with rich knowledge on the field of law and informatics in their respective countries as to customize the study’s interview guides according to local context.

For more information, please see the complete report.

For background, please see Mariya Bedeva-Bright’s post about the project on VoxPopuLII.

HT Michel-Adrien Sheppard.

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.

New on VoxPopuLII: Mokanov on the Canadian Vendor-Neutral Legal Citation Standard & the CanLII Citator

Canada’s pathbreaking vendor-neutral legal citation standard, and CanLII’s innovative RefLex citator, are the topics of Ivan Mokanov’s new post, entitled Environmentally-Friendly Citations, on the VoxPopuLII blog, published by the Legal Information Institute at Cornell University Law School.

Mr. Mokanov is Deputy Director of LexUM, the publisher of CanLII, the Canadian Legal Information Institute.

Mr. Mokanov’s post describes the origins of the neutral standard, its benefits, its implementation by CanLII, and its widespread adoption. The post also discusses the development of and workflow for CanLII’s RefLex online citator.

Because the post discusses technical, policy, and user issues, the post should be of interest to legal information systems administrators and developers, policy advocates, legal information professionals, and all users of CanLII.

Cornell Digital Law Library Meeting

During the week of October 13, 2009, a very rewarding informal meeting of digital law library developers, administrators, and researchers took place at Cornell University’s Legal Information Institute. The gathering was graciously hosted by Dr. Tom Bruce. The purpose of the meeting was to discuss a number of issues respecting free access to law, legal information institutes, and digital law libraries. Photos of the meeting are available here and here. Among the participants were:

• Professor Daniel Poulin, Director of CANLII & LexUM Laboratory;
• Marc-André Morissette, Chief Analyst at LexUM Laboratory;
• Pierre-Paul Lemyre, Head of Products and Business Development at LexUM Laboratory and a Ph.D. student at University of Montreal Faculté de Droit, studying the effects on legal systems of free access to law & legal information institutes;
• Daniel Shane, Software Developer at LexUM Laboratory;
• Elmer Masters, Director of Internet Development at CALI;
• John Joergensen, Reference & Circulation Librarian at the Rutgers University Camden Law Library, and developer of the Rutgers University Camden Law Library Digital Collections;
• Stuart Sierra, Assistant Director of the Program on Law & Technology at Columbia Law School and developer of AltLaw: The Free Legal Search Engine; and
• Sara Frug, Brian Hughes, Daniel Nagy, & David Shetland of Cornell’s Legal Information Institute.

On October 14-15, the following topics were discussed:

• Professor Poulin, Marc-André Morissette, Pierre-Paul Lemyre, & Daniel Shane discussed information acquisitions, text-processing methods, the treatment of images in court decisions, and administrative matters, respecting CANLII;
• Dr. Bruce, Daniel Nagy, & Sara Frug of Cornell’s LII, & Elmer Masters of CALI discussed their use of Drupal to present a variety of types of content, their text processing methods, and the costs and benefits of cloud computing;
• Dr. Bruce, Daniel Nagy, Elmer Masters, and Tim Stanley & Nicolas Moline of Justia discussed using OpenID & OAuth to enable streamlined authentication & access to online legal resources;
• Dr. Bruce, Professor Poulin, and others discussed various methods of legal metadata standardization, including encouraging courts, legislatures, and administrative agencies to adopt publishing standards, and the development and promotion of OAI4Courts as a means of standardizing metadata for court documents, to enable sharing and aggregation of such metadata in open repositories;
• Stuart Sierra described his methods for automated acquisition of US Federal Court decisions, as well as his text processing and data management techniques at AltLaw;
• John Joergensen described his methods for automated acquisition of court decisions, text processing, procedures for digitizing print and microfiche legal documents, and digital preservation techniques, at the Rutgers University Camden Law Library’s digital collections.

On October 16, the following topics were discussed:

• Prof. Poulin discussed the former challenges of adding secondary sources to CANLII, the new possibilities of adding commentary and user generated content to CANLII, and his desire that CANLII be a generative system, in Professor Jonathan Zittrain’s sense of that term in The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It;
• Dr. Bruce, Prof. Poulin, Elmer Masters, and all the participants discussed their plans for sustaining innovation in the coming years at LII, CANLII, & CALI, and for developing business models and strategies;
• Dr. Bruce emphasized the need to develop standards to enable sharing of metadata and legal information objects among digital repositories, and to educate reporters of decisions about the need to enable information sharing in legal digital publishing;
• The LexUM team discussed two different approaches to taxonomies that they have tested respecting CANLII;
• Pierre-Paul Lemyre demonstrated several LexUM Web 2.0 projects, including Le Code civil du Quebéc annoté, which allows users to add annotations, and the CANLEX set of APIs for CANLII, including the RefLex API, which hotlinks legal citations in a user’s document. Prof. Poulin & Pierre-Paul also discussed Lexacto, a search engine enabling practitioners to index and retrieve content on particular legal topics, whether that content is located within or outside their firm. Some of this new technology will be tested at the Supreme Court of Canada;
• Marc-André Morissette demonstrated a drop-down table of contents-based document management system for legislative materials, called LexView, with the Canadian Criminal Code as a prototype. He said that similar technology would be applied to the Nova Scotia Annotated Civil Procedure Rules and continuing legal education materials for British Columbia;
• Dr. Bruce, Elmer Masters, John Joergensen, and the Cornell LII team discussed implementation of OpenID, the possible sharing of taxonomies, and possible collaboration respecting data for updating the U.S. Code;
• In a wrap-up discussion, each participant identified the most valuable information they acquired during the meeting. John Joergensen initiated a new discussion about the need for the legal information institutes to consider new issues in light of the institutes’ maturation and acceptance as key actors in the legal information infrastructure, and underscored digital preservation as one such issue. Dr. Bruce & Prof. Poulin reflected on their careers leading legal information institutes and how their personal roles had changed as their organizations had grown and matured.
• The participants agreed to meet again next autumn, either in Ithaca or in Montreal. Everyone thanked Dr. Bruce and the Cornell LII team for their gracious hospitality.

Many thanks to Dr. Bruce & his team for their gracious hospitality and stimulating discussion.