Legal Document Cloud

There has been some discussion recently of a legal document cloud: a version, specifically for legal texts, of DocumentCloud, the online document repository for journalists that uses OpenCalais to perform semantic analysis and annotation of documents.

[Here is a recent example of the use of DocumentCloud to annotate a legal text, in this instance the U.S. federal district court decision, in the National Security Letters case.]

As he was leaving the Open Data Day DC 2013 hackathon, Alan deLevie tweeted about a legal document cloud.

In a Twitter discussion of this topic at the end of Open Data Day DC 2013, Jonathan Stray said that Docracy is a legal document cloud service, with version control. [Docracy has just opened a beta version of a new technology called The Document Genome, that performs legal document comparison, summarization, and versioning, for a number of applications including compliance.]

Stray also suggested using the Associated Press’s Overview platform to do classification (tagging) of legal document collections.

Then, on March 5, 2013, Alan deLevie posted a readme for a proposed legal document cloud, on GitHub. Here are excerpts of the readme:

What?

I’m trying to build a set of standardized tools for one basic task: Looping through lots of law-related text, processing it, and saving the results. [...]

Why?

Under the hood, you’ll get parallelism and remote code execution from IronWorker. This has several advantages over running this code on your laptop:

Performance. Splitting up the work into chunks is an obvious win.

Reliability. In the middle of a large processing job, and the power goes out and your laptop battery is about to die? No worries. Your job continues to run, with results stored safely.

Curation. The legal informatics/open government/open data communities are coalescing in a great way. Many standalone scripts are emerging for specific text processing tasks. I’d like this repo to be a central place where anyone can quickly make use of these great tools. Batteries included will lower barriers to entry.

Standardization. The legal informatics community could gain by adopting a standard project structure.

Verification. This builds off of point 4. Need to show how you arrived at a certain set of findings? This could be done in maybe ~20 lines of code.

I envision something as simple as installing a Ruby gem, adding some API keys, mixing and matching text processors to suit your needs, then running your corpus through in a simple loop. [...]

A related resource: in October 2012 Elmer Masters of CALI described his proposal for a new cloud-based repository of court decisions, called CourtCloud.

If you know of other information regarding a legal document cloud, please share it in the comments to this post.

[NOTE: Edited on 18 March 2013 to clarify that the idea of a legal document cloud was not discussed aloud at Open Data Day DC 2013 but was instead mentioned on Twitter by Alan deLevie as he was leaving Open Data Day DC 2013. HT @adelevie here and here.]

Archived Tweets and Resources from LVI 2012: Law via the Internet Conference

Click here for archived Twitter tweets, in .csv format, from LVI 2012: Law via the Internet Conference, held 7-9 October 2012 at the Legal Information Institute, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York, USA.

Click here for the conference Website.

The Twitter hashtag for the conference is #lvi2012, and the Twitter account for the conference is @LVI2012.

Click here for the conference program and abstracts of presentations.

Some conference sessions will be livestreamed here.

For blog posts and other resources related to the conference, please see the comments to this post.

October 7-9: LVI 2012: Law via the Internet Conference

LVI 2012: The 25th Law via the Internet Conference, is being held 7-9 October 2012, at the Legal Information Institute, Cornell University Law School, in Ithaca, New York, USA.

The Twitter hashtag for the conference is #lvi2012, and the Twitter account for the conference is @LVI2012.

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

Click here for the conference program and abstracts of presentations.

Some conference sessions will be livestreamed here.

Call for Proposals: ReInventLaw Dubai 2012: An ‘Un’conference on Law, Technology, Innovation, and Entrepreneurship

A call for presentation proposals — with submission deadline of 15 October 2012 — has been issued for ReInventLaw Dubai 2012: “an ‘un’conference devoted to law, technology, innovation, and entrepreneurship” — to be held 10 December 2012 at Media City in Dubai.

The organizers particularly welcome presentations about innovations in legal services or legal education. Presentations can take the form of 6 Minute Ignite Style Presentations or 12 Minute “TED Style” Presentations.

Registration is free.

The event Website describes the event as follows:

ReInvent Law Dubai is an “un”conference devoted to law, technology, innovation, and entrepreneurship.

Anyone interested in the future of law or technology or entrepreneurship will want to participate. Come hear about the innovative ideas generated by the highly-engaging atmosphere of the event!

The event is being sponsored by The ReInventLaw Laboratory at Michigan State University College of Law, and is modeled on the LawTechCamp London 2012 event held last summer.

For more information, please see the ReInventLaw Dubai 2012 Website.

HT @computational.

Francesconi on a Semantic Model for Legal Resources: Annotation and Reasoning over Normative Provisions

Professor Dr. Enrico Francesconi of Università degli Studi di Firenze Dipartimento di Sistemi e Informatica and ITTIG/CNR has posted Semantic Model for Legal Resources: Annotation and Reasoning over Normative Provisions, under review at Semantic Web Journal.

Here is the abstract:

A Semantic Web approach in the legal domain is presented in terms of a model of normative provisions and related axioms. In particular, relation between provisions are identified and modelled by introducing design patterns able to describe Hohfeldian legal fundamental relations and by a query approach able to deal with relations between provisions instances. Examples of semantic annotation of legal textual resources using RDF/OWL standards, as well as advanced access and reasoning facilities over provisions using SPARQL, are shown. The main benefit of the approach is represented by the ability to keep the complexity of the problem within a description logic computational tractability.

ReInvent Law Dubai 2012: Unconference on Law, Technology, Innovation, and Entrepreneurship

ReInvent Law Dubai 2012: Unconference on Law, Technology, Innovation, and Entrepreneurship will be held 10 December 2012 at Dubai Knowledge Village, Dubai, UAE, according to an announcement at Computational Legal Studies.

The event’s organizers will be Professor Dr. Daniel Martin Katz and Professor Renee Newman Knake, both of the Michigan State University College of Law and its new ReInvent Law Laboratory.

According to the event brochure:

ReInvent Law Dubai is an (un)conference focusing on law, technology, innovation and entrepreneurship. Building upon the success of the recent London event, leaders in the fields of law, technology and beyond will come together to share ideas about innovation in the delivery of legal services.

This event is Free, Open and Participatory. Anyone can propose a topic. Entrepreneurs, new media/technology enthusiasts, legal professionals, social networkers, and those curious about future innovation in law and technology will want to attend.

The Michigan State University College of Law Graduate Program at MSU Dubai is a primary sponsor.

For more information, please see the announcement.

HT @computational.

June 29: LawTechCamp London

LawTechCamp London 2012 — “a BarCamp-style community UnConference for new media and technology enthusiasts and legal professionals” — will be held 29 June 2012 in London, England, UK.

The Twitter hashtag for the conference is #lawtechcamplondon.

Click here for archived Twitter tweets — in .csv format — from the event.

Click here for the conference program.

A notable characteristic of this event is that it gathers together in one place individuals from most of the different subgroups of the legal informatics community.

The event’s organizers include:

• Daniel Martin Katz, Michigan State University College of Law
• Renee Newman Knake, Michigan State University College of Law
• Monica Goyal, owner and CEO of MyLegalBriefcase.com
• Lisa Webley, University of Westminster Law School
• John Flood, University of Westminster Law School
• David Allison, The College of Law
• Jon Harman, The College of Law 

HT @reneeknake.

Program Posted for LawTechCamp London 2012

The program has been posted for LawTechCamp London 2012 — “a BarCamp-style community UnConference for new media and technology enthusiasts and legal professionals” — to be held 29 June 2012 in London, England, UK.

The Twitter hashtag for the conference is #lawtechcamplondon.

A notable characteristic of this event is that it gathers together in one place individuals from most of the different subgroups of the legal informatics community.

The event’s organizers include:

• Daniel Martin Katz, Michigan State University College of Law
• Renee Newman Knake, Michigan State University College of Law
• Monica Goyal, owner and CEO of MyLegalBriefcase.com
• Lisa Webley, University of Westminster Law School
• John Flood, University of Westminster Law School
• David Allison, The College of Law
• Jon Harman, The College of Law 

HT @reneeknake.

Accepted Presentations for LVI 2012: Law via the Internet Conference

The accepted presentations and their abstracts have been posted for LVI 2012: The 25th Law via the Internet Conference, to be held 7-9 October 2012, at Cornell University Law School in Ithaca, New York, USA.

Wyner and Peters on Semantic Annotations for Legal Text Processing using GATE Teamware

Dr. Adam Wyner of the University of Liverpool Department of Computer Science and Dr. Wim Peters of the University of Sheffield Department of Computer Science, have published Semantic Annotations for Legal Text Processing using GATE Teamware, in LREC 2012 Conference Proceedings: Semantic Processing of Legal Texts (SPLeT-2012) Workshop, pp. 34-36.

Here is the abstract:

Large corpora of legal texts are increasing available in the public domain. To make them amenable for automated text processing, various sorts of annotations must be added. We consider semantic annotations bearing on the content of the texts – legal rules, case factors, and case decision elements. Adding annotations and developing gold standard corpora (to verify rule-based or machine learning algorithms) is costly in terms of time, expertise, and cost. To make the processes efficient, we propose several instances of GATE’s Teamware to support annotation tasks for legal rules, case factors, and case decision elements. We engage annotation volunteers (law school students and legal professionals). The reports on the tasks are to be presented at the workshop.

For more information, please see Dr. Wyner’s post, Crowdsourced Legal Case Annotation.