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

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.]

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.

Boyd, Hoffman, et al. on Building a Taxonomy of Litigation: Clusters of Causes of Action in Federal Complaints

Professor Dr. Christina L. Boyd of the State University of New York (SUNY) – Department of Political Science, Professor David A. Hoffman of the Temple University School of Law and the Cultural Cognition Project at Yale Law School, and colleagues, have posted Building a Taxonomy of Litigation: Clusters of Causes of Action in Federal Complaints.

This article has been published in: Journal of Empirical Legal Studies, 10(2), 253-287 (2013):
http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/jels.12010

Here is the abstract:

This project empirically explores civil litigation from its inception by examining the content of civil complaints. We utilize spectral cluster analysis on a newly compiled federal district court dataset of causes of action in complaints to illustrate the relationship of legal claims to one another, the broader composition of lawsuits in trial courts, and the breadth of pleading in individual complaints. Our results shed light not only on the networks of legal theories in civil litigation but also on how lawsuits are classified and the strategies that plaintiffs and their attorneys employ when commencing litigation. This approach permits us to lay the foundations for a more precise and useful taxonomy of federal litigation than has been previously available, one that, after the Supreme Court’s recent decisions in Bell Atlantic v. Twombly (2007) and Ashcroft v. Iqbal (2009), has also arguably never been more relevant than it is today.

This study is notable for several reasons, including that Computational Legal Studies founders Professor Dr. Daniel Martin Katz and Michael Bommarito commented on the statistical methodology used in the study, and that the study uses government data made public through RECAP, the open government data project developed by Harlan Yu, Stephen Schultze, and Timothy B. Lee, all of Princeton’s Center for Information Technology Policy.

Further, this study exemplifies the scholarly use of open government data predicted by David Robinson, Harlan Yu, and Ed Felten, in their influential article, Government Data and the Invisible Hand.

HT @freemoth.

Yu and Schultze: Using Software to Liberate U.S. Case Law

Harlan Yu of the Princeton University Center for Information Technology Policy (CITP), and Stephen Schultze of Princeton’s Center for Information Technology Policy, have published Using software to liberate U.S. case law, in XRDS: Crossroads: The ACM Magazine for Students, December 2011.

[The article appears in a special issue of XRDS: Crossroads on the topic, "Computer Science in Service of Democracy", edited by Peter Kinnaird of Carnegie Mellon University. Click here for Mr. Kinnaird's preface to the special issue.]

In their article, Mr. Yu and Mr. Schultze describe their development of RECAP, a Firefox extension that “crowdsources the purchase of the [U.S. federal courts'] PACER repository [of court records] by helping users automatically share their purchases.”

The authors also describe how features of PACER limit public access to judicial information. The authors discuss their research — presented here and here — showing that PACER’s information management practices permit disclosure of sensitive personal information online. The authors also recommend reforms to U.S. federal court information technology that would protect citizens’ privacy while improving citizens’ access to court records of public interest.

For more information on RECAP and reform of PACER, please see Mr. Schultze’s VoxPopuLII post: PACER, RECAP, and the Movement to Free American Case Law.

Lee on Redaction Failures in PACER

Timothy B. Lee of the Princeton University Department of Computer Science and Center for Information Technology Policy (CITP) has posted Studying the Frequency of Redaction Failures in PACER, on the CITP’s blog, Freedom to Tinker.

In this post, Mr. Lee reports on research respecting documents from the U.S. federal courts’ PACER database. Using customized software, he found that, respecting some of these documents, redactions have been attempted, but have failed. The information not redacted included:

trade secrets such as sales figures and confidential product information. Other improperly redacted documents contain sensitive medical information, addresses, and dates of birth. Still others contain the names of witnesses, jurors, plaintiffs, and one minor.

Mr. Lee then offers recommendations to the U.S. federal judiciary respecting how to avoid this problem. He links to a letter, stating many of these recommendations, that he recently sent to a committee of the Judicial Conference of the United States.

Mr. Lee has also has posted the software code that he used to identify the unsuccessfully redacted documents.

Mr. Lee says that this research was funded by Public.Resource.Org.

For more information on CITP’s PACER-related research, please see Stephen Schultze’s recent VoxPopuLII post, PACER, RECAP, and the Movement to Free American Case Law.