Call for Papers: JURIX 2013: International Conference on Legal Knowledge and Information Systems

A call for papers — with submission deadline of 2 September 2013 — has been posted for JURIX 2013: International Conference on Legal Knowledge and Information Systems, to be held 11-13 December 2013, at the University of Bologna.

Papers are invited on the following topics:

• Support for lawyers, in legal reasoning, document drafting, negotiation;
• Support for the production and management of legislation, in agenda setting, policy analysis, drafting, workflow management, monitoring implementation;
• Support for the judiciary, in application of the law, analysis of evidence, management of cases;
• Support for police activities, in forensic inquiries, search and evaluation of evidence, management of investigations;
• Support for public administration, in applying regulations and managing information;
• Support for the acquisition, management or use of legal knowledge, using rules, cases, neural networks, intelligent agents or other methods;
• Systems and methods to support policies and legal issues for social networks;
• Retrieval of legal information and eDiscovery;
• Legal education;
• Digital-rights management;
• Alternative dispute resolution, particularly on-line;
• Regulatory compliance and compliance of business processes;
• Theoretical foundations for the use of Artificial Intelligence techniques in the legal domain;
• Models of legal knowledge, including concepts (legal ontologies), rules, cases, principles, values and procedures;
• Legal inference and argumentation;
• Verification and validation of legal knowledge systems;
• Management of legal information in the semantic web, including legal open data;
• XML standards for legal documents and rules, including legislative, judicial, administrative acts as well as private documents, such as contracts;
• Modelling the legal interactions of autonomous agents and digital institutions;
• Methods for managing organizational change when introducing legal knowledge systems;
• Evaluation of systems using advanced informatics techniques in legal applications;
• Interdisciplinary applications of legal informatics methods and systems.

For more details, please see the call for papers.

HT Jurix

CODR 2013: Conference on Online Dispute Resolution: Tweets and Resources

This post links to resources related to CODR 2013: Conference on Online Dispute Resolution, held 19 April 2013 at Stanford Law School.

Click here for Twitter tweets from the conference, archived in .csv format.

The Twitter hashtag for the conference was #CODR2013

Some papers from the conference are available at
http://blogs.law.stanford.edu/codr2013/papers/

Here is the conference agenda (from here):

Panel 1: The Impact of ODR on the Practice of Law

Ron Dolin, Lecturer in Law, Stanford Law School: “Impact of ODR on Small Claims”

Richard S. Granat, Director, Center for Law Practice Technology and CEO/Founder, LawMediaLabs, Inc.: “Software-Assisted Online Divorce Mediation”

Ayelet Sela, JSD Candidate, Stanford Law School: “ODR System Design: Lessons from Research and Practice”

Panel 2: The Technology of ODR

James Ring, CEO, Fair Outcomes, Inc.: “Using Online Commitment Mechanisms to Manage and Resolve Legal Claims“

Loic Coutelier, Director of Arbitration and Product Manager, Modria.com: “Three Practical Applications of ODR Innovations”

Jin Ho Verdonschot, Justice Sector Advisor, The Netherlands: “The Future of Courts: A New Procedure for Neighbor Disputes in the Netherlands”

Moderator: Roland Vogl, Lecturer in Law and Executive Director, Stanford Program in Law, Science and Technology

Panel 3: ODR in the International Arena

Colin Rule, CEO, Modria.com: “Online Dispute Resolution and Internet Justice“

Vikki M. Rogers, Director, Institute of International Commercial Law, Pace Law School: “Managing Disputes in the Online Global Marketplace: Reviewing the Progress of UNCITRAL’s Working Group III on ODR“

Amy J. Schmitz, Professor of Law, University of Colorado School of Law: “ODR to Address American Exceptionalism in Arbitration“

Moderator: Janet Martinez, Senior Lecturer in Law and Director, Gould Negotiation & Mediation Program, Stanford Law School

For videos of this conference, please see the comments to this post.

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

Call for Papers: AICOL 2013: Workshop on AI Approaches to the Complexity of Legal Systems

A call for papers — with abstract submission deadline of 28 February 2013 and full paper submission deadline of 15 May 2013 — has been issued for AICOL 2013: Workshop on AI Approaches to the Complexity of Legal Systems, to be held at a date to be determined, between 21 and 27 July 2013, in Belo Horizonte, Brazil.

The workshop is being collocated with XXVI. World Congress of Philosophy of Law and Social Philosophy.

Papers for AICOL 2013 are invited on the following topics:

• Law and Science
• Knowledge Management
• Law and Cognitive Science
• Cognitive schemas
• Law and Complexity Theory
• Law and Robotics
• Complex Systems
• Law and Mathematics
• Legal Theory
• Legal Graphic Representation
• Legal Culture
• Game Theory
• Computer Ethics
• Formalization of Legal Systems and Norms
• Artificial Societies
• Rules and Standards
• Argumentative Frameworks
• Agreement technologies
• Legal Ontologies
• Electronic Institutions
• Governance
• Legal Concepts
• Legal Information Retrieval
• Legal Thesauri
• Online Dispute Resolution
• Taxonomies
• Trends in e-Discovery, e-Courts, e-Administration
• Natural Language Processing (NLP)
• Legal Knowledge Acquisition
• Users’ studies
• Legal Knowledge Representation

For more details, please see the call.

HT Professor Dr. Monica Palmirani

New book by Richard Susskind: Tomorrow’s Lawyers

Professor Dr. Richard Susskind has published a new book entitled Tomorrow’s Lawyers: An Introduction to Your Future (Oxford University Press, 2013).

The book is available now in the UK, and will be available next month in the U.S.

Here is the publisher’s description:

In his newest provocative and forward-looking volume on the legal profession, Richard Susskind — the best-selling author of The End of Lawyers? and The Future of Law –predicts fundamental and irreversible changes in the world of law. What Susskind sees is eye-opening-a legal world of virtual courts, Internet-based global legal businesses, online document production, commoditized service, legal process outsourcing, and web-based simulated practice. Legal markets will be liberalized, with new jobs for lawyers and new employers too.

Tomorrow’s Lawyers is a definitive guide to this future–for young and aspiring lawyers, and for all who want to modernize our legal and justice systems. It introduces the new legal landscape and offers practical guidance for those who intend to build careers and businesses in law. Susskind identifies the key drivers of change, such as the economic downturn, and considers how these will shape the legal marketplace. He then sketches out the new legal landscape as he envisions it, highlighting the changing role of law firms-and in-house lawyers-and the coming of virtual hearings and online dispute resolution. He also suggests solutions to major concerns within the legal profession, such as diminishing public funding, and explores alternative roles for future lawyers in a world increasingly dominated by IT. And what are the prospects for aspiring lawyers? Susskind predicts what new jobs and new employers there will be, equipping prospective lawyers with penetrating questions to put to their current and future bosses.

Tomorrow’s Lawyers is an essential roadmap to the future of law for those who want to survive the rapidly changing legal landscape.

Features

• The first introduction for young and aspiring lawyers to the new legal landscape and how to succeed in it
• A revised and updated vision of the future, by one of the world’s leading experts whose past predictions for the law have generally come to pass
• Provides solutions to major concerns within the legal profession, such as diminishing public funding, and explores alternative roles for future lawyers in a world increasingly dominated by IT
• Identifies new employers for lawyers of the future and equips young lawyers with questions to ask prospective employers

Neil Rose has a new summary of the book at Legal Futures: Susskind: no future for high street firms, but window of opportunity for mid-sized practices.

HT @charonqc

JURIX 2012: 17-19 December

JURIX 2012: International Conference on Legal Knowledge and Information Systems is being held 17-19 December 2012, at Leibniz Center for Law, University of Amsterdam.

The Twitter hashtag for the conference is #jurix2012

Click here for archived Twitter tweets (in .csv format) from the conference.

Click here for the conference program.

Click here for the list of workshops and tutorials.

HT @jurixfoundation

Suquet-Capdevila: An Application for Online Consumer Mediation in Catalonia (Geoconsum)

Josep Suquet-Capdevila of Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona Institute of Law and Technology has published Mobile Technology and Consumer Empowerment: An Application for Online Consumer Mediation in Catalonia (Geoconsum), European Journal of Law and Technology, Vol. 3, No. 2, 2012.

Here is the abstract:

Today, courts proceedings remain complex and expensive for consumers. Alternative Dispute Resolution (ADR) and Online Dispute Resolution (ODR) are means of consumer redress. Nevertheless, they have not achieved its full potential, partly due to the lack of consumer awareness. Currently, there are different legislative initiatives at the EU level devoted to improving consumer empowerment as well as, more particularly, ADR and ODR. Moreover, Information technology (IT) devices such as smartphones are improving consumers’ access to information and they may contribute to empowering consumers and giving them better access to justice. Further to this contextual framework, this article presents Geoconsum [click here for code on GitHub], an open source mobile application that contains a database on consumer mediation entities and a compendium of consumer legislation applicable in Catalonia. In the near future, this application may be integrated with an online mediation platform. This article shows the databases’ methodology and implementing process. Furthermore, it shows the mobile application functionalities and the search and retrieval capabilities, based on parameterised searches as well as on geolocation technology. The device also works as a mapping service application since it offers a route planner to access the nearest consumer mediation entity.

Call for Papers: ICAIL 2013: International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Law

A call for papers — with paper submission deadline of 18 January 2013 — has been issued for ICAIL 2013: 14th International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Law, to be held 10-14 June 2013 in Rome, Italy.

The Twitter account for the conference is @ICAIL2013 . The Twitter hashtag for the conference is #ICAIL2013. The conference organizers invite those interested to follow the Twitter account and hashtag and to comment and contribute with the latest news.

The conference features two tracks: one for “regular papers” and one for “innovative applications papers.”

Here is the complete list of deadlines:

• Mentoring program request deadline: November 9, 2012
• Mentoring program paper deadline: November 16, 2012
• Submission of workshop and tutorial proposals: December 7, 2012
• Submission of abstracts (optional): January 11, 2013
• Submission of papers deadline: January 18, 2013
• Notification of acceptance: March 20, 2013
• Final revised and formatted papers due: April 19, 2013
• Conference: June 10 – June 14, 2013

Papers are invited on the following topics:

• Formal and computational models of legal reasoning
• Knowledge acquisition techniques for the legal domain, including natural language processing and data mining
• Computational models of argumentation and decision making
• Legal knowledge representation including legal ontologies and common sense knowledge
• Automatic legal text classification and summarization
• Automated information extraction from legal databases and texts
• Machine learning and data mining applied to legal databases
• Conceptual or model-based legal information retrieval
• E-discovery and e-disclosure
• E-government and e-justice
• Computational models of evidential reasoning
• Modeling norms for multi-agent systems
• Modeling negotiation and contract formation
• Computational models of case-based legal reasoning
• Online dispute resolution
• Intelligent legal tutoring systems
• Intelligent support systems for the legal domain
• Interdisciplinary applications of legal informatics methods and systems

For more information, please see the call for papers.

HT Anne Gardner

[NOTE: Updated 23 November 2012 to add the Twitter account and hashtag. HT Enrico Francesconi]

7 September: Extended CfP Deadline for JURIX 2012

The call for papers submission deadline for JURIX 2012: International Conference on Legal Knowledge and Information Systems has been extended to 7 September 2012.

Click here for the call for papers.

The conference will be held 17-19 December 2012 at the University of Amsterdam.

Papers are invited “on the advanced management of legal information and knowledge, covering foundations, methods, tools, systems and applications” concerning the following topics:

• Support for lawyers, in legal reasoning, document drafting, negotiation;
• Support for the production and management of legislation, in agenda setting, policy analysis, drafting, workflow management, monitoring implementation;
• Support for the judiciary, in application of the law, analysis of evidence, management of cases;
• Support for police activities, in forensic inquiries, search and evaluation of evidence, management of investigations;
• Support for public administration, in applying regulations and managing information;
• Support for the acquisition, management or use of legal knowledge, using rules, cases, neural networks, intelligent agents or other methods;
• Systems and methods to support policies and legal issues for social networks;
• Retrieval of legal information;
• Legal education;
• Digital-rights management;
• Alternative dispute resolution, particularly on-line;
• Regulatory compliance and compliance of business processes;
• Theoretical foundations for the use of Artificial Intelligence techniques in the legal domain;
• Models of legal knowledge, including concepts (legal ontologies), rules, cases, principles, values and procedures;
• Legal inference and argumentation;
• Verification and validation of legal knowledge systems;
• Management of legal information in the semantic web;
• XML standards for legal documents, including legislative, judicial, administrative acts as well as private documents, such as contracts;
• Modelling the legal interactions of autonomous agents and digital institutions;
• Methods for managing organizational change when introducing legal knowledge systems;
• Evaluation of systems using advanced informatics techniques in legal applications;
• Interdisciplinary applications of legal informatics methods and systems.

For more information, please see the call for papers.

HT Dr. Rinke Hoekstra.

Okamoto Wins NSF Grant to Develop Virtual Law Practice Platform to Train Law Students

Professor Karl Okamoto of Drexel University College of Law has been awarded a National Science Foundation grant to develop a virtual law practice platform for use by law students learning practice skills, according to Dara McBride’s article, Drexel law professor creates a virtual venue for getting real-world experience, Philadelphia Inquirer, 14 August 2012.

The platform is called LawMeets.

Click here for a description of the grant.

In a tweet today LawMeets suggested it may be willing to share its code.

HT @stephkimbro.