Lissner and Carver on CourtListener: Where we are and where we’d like to go

Michael Lissner and Professor Dr. Brian Carver of University of California, Berkeley, have posted CourtListener: Where we are and where we’d like to go, at VoxPopuLII.

Here is an excerpt:

At CourtListener, we are making a free database of court opinions with the ultimate goal of providing the entire U.S. case-law corpus to the world for free and combining it with cutting-edge search and research tools. We–like most readers of this blog–believe that for justice to truly prevail, the law must be open and equally accessible to everybody.

It is astonishing to think that the entire U.S. case-law corpus is not currently available to the world at no cost. Many have started down this path and stopped, so we know we’ve set a high goal for a humble open source project. From time to time it’s worth taking a moment to reflect on where we are and where we’d like to go in the coming years. [...]

The post discusses the development and current technology of CourtListener, which includes email alerts of new cases, automatic identification and cross-linking of citations, a set of scrapers called Juriscraper for gathering court decisions from court Websites, and bulk access to court decisions in XML.

The post also describes future plans for development, which include:

adding oral argument audio, case briefs, and data from PACER. Adding these new types of information to CourtListener is a must if we want to be more useful for research purposes, but doing so is a long-term goal, given the complexity of doing them well.

We also plan to build an opinion classifier that could automatically, and without human intervention, determine the subsequent treatment of opinions. Done right, this would allow our users to know at a glance if the opinion they’re reading was subsequently followed, criticized, or overruled, making our system even more valuable to our users. [...] You can see our plans on our feature tracker, our bugs in our bug tracker, and can get in touch in our forum.

For more details, please see the complete post.

HT @caminick

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

Lee: The inside story of Aaron Swartz’s campaign to liberate court filings

Timothy B. Lee has posted The inside story of Aaron Swartz’s campaign to liberate court filings, at Ars Technica.

The article describes Lee’s recent interview with Stephen Schultze about his and Swartz’s efforts to make U.S. federal court documents public.

Here is an excerpt:

A key figure in Swartz’s PACER effort was Steve Schultze, now a researcher at Princeton’s Center for Information Technology Policy. Schultze recruited Swartz to the PACER fight and wrote the Perl script Swartz modified and then used to scrape the site.

Until recently, Schultze has been quiet about his role in Swartz’s PACER scraping caper. But Swartz’s death inspired Schultze to speak out. In a recent phone interview, Schultze described how Swartz downloaded gigabytes of PACER data and how that data has been put to use throughout the last four years. Schultze told us he hopes the outrage over Swartz’s death will provide momentum for legislation to finish the job Swartz and Schultze started almost five years ago: tearing down PACER’s paywall. [...]

Click here for information about Schultze’s new Open PACER project.

For more details, please see the complete article.

HT @advocatesstudio

Aaron Swartz Memorial Grants to further development of RECAP open law repository

On 3 February 2013 an additional $10,000 for the Aaron Swartz Memorial Grants — which fund the development of the RECAP project aimed at increasing public access to U.S. federal judicial information — were announced by Stephen Schultze of Princeton’s Center for Information Technology Policy.

Here is an excerpt from the announcement:

The generous folks over at Google’s Open Source Programs team have pledged to support two more RECAP-related project awards — at $5,000 each. These are open to anyone who wishes to submit a proposal for a significant improvement to the RECAP system. We will work with the proposers to scope the project and define what qualifies for the award.

There are several potential ideas. For instance, someone might propose add support to RECAP for displaying the user’s current balance and prompting the user to liberate up to their free quarterly $15 allocation as the end of the quarter approaches (inspired by Operation Asymptote). Someone might propose to improve the archive.recapthelaw.org interface, and to improve detection and removal of private information. Someone might propose some other idea that we haven’t thought of. You may wish to watch the discussion of a few of these initial ideas from our developer kickoff session.

Email info@recapthelaw.org if you are interested. Thanks again to the Think Computer Foundation and Google.

These grants are in addition to the original $5,000 in grants sponsored by Think Computer Foundation and the Center for Information Technology Policy at Princeton University, where RECAP was developed.

Click here for Stephen Schultze’s VoxPopuLII post explaining RECAP.

HT @harlanyu and @sjschultze

Schultze on Open PACER

Stephen Schultze of Princeton’s Center for Information Technology Policy has launched Open PACER, a site for crowdsourcing the drafting of The Open PACER Act of 2013.

The intent of the bill is to make the PACER federal judicial database accessible free of charge to the public.

The bill currently reads:

The federal courts shall charge no fee for public access to information or documents described in subsection (a) [i.e., the content of PACER], or for any services provided by the court to the public for searching or indexing such information or documents.

In his post about Open PACER, Steve writes that the Open PACER Act “is drafted in Legislative XML, allows you to comment, and the code is available on github.”

Click here for video of Steve’s presentation about Open PACER at the Kick-starting the 113th Congress Conference.

Click here for the slides and transcript of the presentation.

Click here for other work by Steve on increasing public access to PACER.

Videos of Legal Information-related Presentations at Kick-starting the 113th Congress Conference

Click here for videos of legal information-related presentations at the Kick-starting the 113th Congress Conference, an event of the Advisory Committee on Transparency, held 28 January 2013 at the U.S. Congress’s Rayburn House Office Building, Washington, DC.

Public access to law-related data @ Kick-starting the 113th Congress Conference

Public access to law-related data is likely to be addressed at Kick-starting the 113th Congress, an event of the Advisory Committee on Transparency, to be held 28 January 2013 at the U.S. Congress’s Rayburn House Office Building, Washington, DC.

Public access to legal data is likely to be addressed by at least two speakers at the conference:

• Jeremy Miller, Esq., of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics: [video of presentation:] Expanding Access to OLC
• Jeremy Miller, Esq., of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics: [video of presentation:] Make CRS Reports Public
• Stephen J. Schultze of Princeton’s Center for Information Technology Policy: [video of presentation:] Open PACER
• Dr. Joshua Tauberer of GovTrack: [video of presentation:] Hire a Transparency Director
• Dr. Harlan Yu of Robinson + Yu LLC: [video of presentation:] Making Law Easier to Understand

Click here for videos of many of the presentations at the conference.

Click here for more information on speakers, or to RSVP.

For videos of presentations and reports on the conference, please see the comments to this post.

HT @govtrack

[NOTE: Updated 2 February 2013 to list Jeremy Miller's and Harlan Yu's presentations and to link to video.]

Malamud on Aaron and freeing legal data

Carl Malamud of Public.Resource.Org has posted his eulogy for Aaron Swartz, entitled Aaron’s Army.

The eulogy describes several of Carl and Aaron’s efforts to make legal data publicly available, including U.S. copyright registration records and U.S. federal judicial documents from the fee-based PACER database.

Data made public as a result of those efforts are now used in a number of publicly available services.

HT @binarybits

Operation Asymptote crowdsources the freeing of PACER content

The legal open data and e-participation organization PlainSite has posted a new tool called Operation Asymptote, which crowdsources the process of making PACER content publicly available.

PACER is the U.S. federal judiciary’s fee-based database of U.S. federal court decisions and litigation papers.

PlainSite describes the tool as follows:

Operation Asymptote is an initiative designed to download as much of PACER as possible by spreading the burden across many individuals, none of whom need to spend anything by staying under PACER’s $15.00 per quarter free access allowance.

Aaron Greenspan has written a new post providing background information about Operation Asymptote.

HT @PlainSite

Katz on Quantitative Legal Prediction

Professor Dr. Daniel Martin Katz of the Michigan State University College of Law and the ReInvent Law Laboratory has published Quantitative Legal Prediction – or – How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Start Preparing for the Data Driven Future of the Legal Services Industry, forthcoming in Emory Law Journal.

Here is the abstract:

Do I Have a Case? What is Our Likely Exposure? How much is this Going to Cost? What will happen if we leave this particular provision out of this contract? How can we best staff this particular legal matter? These are core questions asked by sophisticated clients such as general counsels as well as consumers at the retail level. Whether generated by a mental model or a sophisticated algorithm, prediction is a core component of the guidance that lawyers offer. Indeed, it is by generating informed answers to these types of questions that many lawyers earn their respective wage.

Every single day lawyers and law firms are providing predictions to their clients regarding their prospects in litigation and the cost associated with its pursuit (defense). How are these predictions being generated? Precisely what data or model is being leveraged? Could a subset of these predictions be improved by access to outcome data in a large number of ‘similar’ cases. Simply put, the answer is yes. Quantitative legal prediction already plays a significant role in certain practice areas and this role is likely increase as greater access to appropriate legal data becomes available.

This article is dedicated to highlighting the coming age of Quantitative Legal Prediction with hopes that practicing lawyers, law students and law schools will take heed and prepare to survive (thrive) in this new ordering. Simply put, most lawyers, law schools and law students are going to have to do more to prepare for the data driven future of this industry. In other words, welcome to Law’s Information Revolution and yeah – there is going to be math on the exam.

Click here for slides from the presentation version of the paper, Quantitative Legal Prediction.