Masters on CourtCloud: A New Repository for Court Opinions

Elmer Masters of CALI introduced a new technology called CourtCloud today in a presentation at LVI 2012: Law via the Internet Conference.

Here is a description of CourtCloud from the service’s Website:

• CourtCloud is a repository for court opinions.
• Only the court can upload documents to CourtCloud.
• Save word processor files in the desktop CourtCloud folder.
• Saved word processor files are copied to the CourtCloud server.
• CourtCloud processes the document creating PDF, HTML, and XML versions.
• The files are stored in the court’s CourtCloud folder.
• Original file + PDF, HTML, XML versions are available on the desktop and archived on the server.
• There is no direct public access to CourtCloud.
• Opinions saved to CourtCloud are added to the Free Law Reporter
• Free Law Reporter provides powerful searching and public API for access.

Click here for Twitter tweets about the presentation.

Malmgren on Legal Information in the Cloud: A Basis for New Services

Staffan Malmgren of the Swedish Courts Administration and the free access to law service of Sweden, lagen.nu, has posted slides from his presentation entitled Legal Information in the Cloud: A Basis for New Services [Rättsinformation i molnet – en grund för nya tjänster?], given 15 November 2011, at Juridiska tjänster via webben - drivkrafter och överväganden, in Stockholm, Sweden.

Here is the abstract:

The presentation outlines the architecture of the official Swedish legal information system and explains choices made in its construction. As proponents of Open data, we want to to enable the construction of a large variety of legal information services using the official information system. We specify a number of features of an information system, and explains how each of these enables a new class of service upon the data.

These features are: Clear rules for reuse, facilities for bulk downloading of data, stable and predictable identifiers for documents and other entities in the system, retrieval of individual documents, standardized document formats, update/notification mechanisms for when data is changed, basic metadata about documents and entities, relational metadata that connect documents and entities, and finally API’s for creating result list of documents and entities matching a set of criteria (including free text search of document text).

These features are ranked in order of how essential they are to implement, and for each new feature we explain the new class of services that the feature enable. E.g. stable and predictable identifiers allow document retrieval by identity, but also value-added information from third parties (e.g. legal commentary for a statute) when everyone agrees on the identifier for a particular information resource.

At the far end, these features enable the construction of legal information services that do not by themselves store any data or implement e.g. free text search or relevance ranking. Data can be retrieved on demand by other services, enabling a legal information cloud service.

For more information, please contact Mr. Malmgren.

Thanks to Mr. Malmgren for sending the abstract.

ADIJ 2010: Générations Numériques

The 2010 Annual Conference of ADIJ — l’Association pour le développement de l’information juridique — on the topic of Générations Numériques, will be held 30 September 2010, at Maison du Barreau – 2/4 rue de Harlay, Paris 1er.

The conference is co-sponsored by l’Ordre des Avocats de Paris.

The legal informatics sessions of the conference include:

• Bruno Martin Laprade, La dématérialisation du travail collégial au sein d’une Cour Administrative d’Appel : une expérience réussie;
• Flavien Errera, Samuel Frédéric Servière, and Patrice Platel, Atelier Nouvelles technologies en droit public: La réutilisation des données publiques, l’accès du citoyen aux données de l’administration [...].

For more information, please see the announcement.

HT Stéphane Cottin.

New on VoxPopuLII: Bock on The Impact of Metadata Standards on Traditional Legal Online Services in Germany

Dr. Andreas Bock of kjur.de has posted The Impact of Metadata Standards on Traditional Legal Online Services in Germany, on the VoxPopuLII Blog, published by the Legal Information Institute at Cornell University Law School.

In his post, Dr. Bock argues that metadata standards — such as the new jurMeta standard — will play a vital role in emerging online legal information services. Dr. Bock begins by describing the current state of online legal publishing in Germany, and identifies as key factors the increasing availability of primary law on the free Web, an abundance of free open source software, the effectiveness of legal online social networks, and the potential for major advances in legal information retrieval. He notes that these factors are pushing the online legal information environment in the direction of greater public access to legal information, in ways consistent with the goals of the eGovernment / eParticipation movement and the EU’s Public Sector Information Directive.

Dr. Bock then predicts how the German digital legal information environment will develop in the next decade. He contends that the current trends in electronic legal publishing will usher in a future legal information environment characterized by low barriers to entry, and a very large number of service providers offering a great variety of services, including both fee-based and free-of-charge offerings, and ranging from barebones retrieval systems to sophisticated expert systems. Dr. Bock also speculates on the ability of established legal publishers to adapt to this new, more competitive and innovative environment.

Dr. Bock asserts that in this emerging digital legal information space, metadata standards will play a key role in connecting primary legal resources with the knowledge representation technologies of the legal Semantic Web.

Dr. Bock’s post will be of particular interest to developers and administrators of legal information systems who seek guidance about the future of this information domain. This post will also be of interest to those seeking a better understanding of the digital legal information landscape in Germany.

Wilko, A Draft 50 State Survey of Copyright Claims in State Codes and Court Opinions

Kate Wilko of the Stanford University Law Library has posted A Draft 50 State Survey of Copyright Claims in State Codes and Court Opinions on Legal Research Plus.

The survey — which was conducted in conjunction with the Law.gov legal open government data project — covers U.S. state statutory codes and court decisions.

Parliamentary Documents in XML from PoliticalMashup

Several corpora of full text parliamentary documents in XML have been posted at PoliticalMashup by Professor Dr. Maarten Marx of the Universiteit van Amsterdam Informatics Institute  and colleagues. The corpora include:

• EU Parliament in XML (apparently includes all documents contained in the official public database, with instructions for harvesting);
• DutchParl: A Corpus of Parliamentary Documents in Dutch (appears to include all digitally available Dutch-language parliamentary documents from The Netherlands, Flanders, and Belgium);
• Parliamentary Documents from Spain (includes “all parliamentary documents from Spain since its first legislative period in 1977″ through some time in 2009).

WebLaws.org: What’s Next for This New Resource from Robb Shecter?

WebLaws.org is a new, free legal information resource — with added functions available for a fee — providing access to the statutes of multiple U.S. states, and created by Robb Shecter.

Robb is well known as the developer of OregonLaws.org, the free access to law site for Oregon statutes, legal news, and Web services that improve access to those sources, including research trails, a corpus search, a legal glossary, and a “Law Robot” that automatically retrieves full text of statutes in response to a citation number.

Robb accepts suggestions for developing the site here, and discusses his development approach in his post The Recipe for Better Legal Information Services, at the VoxPopuLII blog, published by Cornell’s Legal Information Institute.

Currently, WebLaws.org features the following content and services:

• All of the content and services of OregonLaws.org;
• New York statutes and legal news, with a research trail;
• An archive/public repository, that currently contains five editions of the Oregon Revised Statutes; and
• An API.

Last week, Robb kindly shared with me his plans for further development of WebLaws.org. In the coming months, he hopes to add the following content and functions to the site:

• Cross-jurisdiction searching via an LCSH [Library of Congress Subject Heading]-based ontology. Each jd [jurisdiction] will have a mapping or adapter between its terms and the LCSH allowing meaningful semantic searches across many states. There’ll also be an optional LCSH-centric view of the site for people browising jd’s that they’re not familiar with.
• Adding LCSH’s to the legal glossary to allow subject-based filtering, and context for the result.
• Finishing the NY site ["New York laws, statutes, and news"] to the same level of quality as Oregon [OregonLaws.org].
• Figuring out a way to adequately present CA [California] laws even though the legislature doesn’t provide “leadlines” (titles) of the actual sections.
• Creating a feed for NY listing upcoming changes to the statutes.
• Creating an archive of older NY statute revisions.
• Creating 3–4 iPhone apps: legal glossary, Oregon statutes, NY statutes, etc. I’ll post a couple screen shots to my blog.
• Developing more web APIs to give access to the content. (I currently have one available, which I’ve listed at Programmable Web: http://www.programmableweb.com/api/weblaws.
• Creating subject-area micro-sites (e.g., Oregon bicycle law) which would be edited by attorneys and cull together references to legal resources.
• Better automate the inclusion of relevant secondary sources.
• Visualization of the structure of laws — this is something I got started with, but it hasn’t been a necessity. I’ve got the ontologies fully OO modeled; I just need to find some good vis. libraries.

Many thanks to Robb for sharing these exciting plans, with which we wish him much success.