Wilson: Should Reed Elsevier Sell Lexis-Nexis?

Jason Wilson of Jones McClure Publishing has published Should Reed Elsevier sell Lexis-Nexis? at rethinc.k.

In this post, Mr. Wilson comments on recent reports and posts about the possibility that the publishing conglomerate Reed Elsevier might leave the legal publishing industry by selling its LexisNexis unit.

Mr. Wilson places this discussion within the wider context of the decline of the legal publishing industry, as described in Robert McKay’s recent Slaw.ca post entitled The End of Legal Publishing?

For more information please see the complete post.

Wilson on Technology-Driven Transformation in Legal Services

Jason Wilson of Jones McClure Publishing has published two widely discussed new posts on technology-driven change in legal services: The Rise of the Programmers and I Am Now an App. The posts appear on Slaw.ca, the Canadian legal blog.

In these posts, Jason presents a distinctive vision of how technology is transforming the provision of legal services. He describes the rate and salience of change, furnishes examples of technology-driven development in the legal sector, and identifies practice areas that seem particularly susceptible to substantial change under the influence of technology.

More of Jason’s writings on legal technology and legal publishing are available at his blog, rethinc.k.

Court Video Developments

Three notable courtroom video projects have recently been launched.

First, proceedings of the UK Supreme Court are now being televised and Webcast live on SkyNews. Click here for Professor Simon Fodden’s post about this project at Slaw.ca.

Second, a pilot project to offer live video coverage of proceedings in selected U.S. federal district courts has been launched.

Third, proceedings of the Massachusetts Commonwealth District Court in Quincy are being Webcast live daily by OpenCourt, a project of WBUR in Boston. This project is funded by the Knight Foundation’s Knight News Challenge. OpenCourt posts updates on Twitter at @OpenCourtus.

If you know of other recent developments in offering video/Internet access to court proceedings, please feel free to tell us about them in the comments.

Citizen Lawmaking and Technology: What’s New and What’s Ahead?

Citizen Lawmaking and Technology: What’s New and What’s Ahead? is the title of my new post at Slaw, the Canadian legal blog. The post describe recent developments in law-related eParticipation, such as ePetition, eConsultation, eRulemaking, electronic voting, and voters’ guides that describe ballot propositions, in the UK, EU, and US.

If you know of other recent developments in these areas, please feel free to share them in the comments.

More on: Why Are Some Law Journal Publishers Not Using the Web to Promote Their Articles?

My new post at Slaw, entitled More on: Finding Hidden Treasure, discusses an odd circumstance in legal publishing: certain law journal publishers are not promoting (i.e., not posting interoperable metadata) or licensing the articles in their journals on the Web. This post explores possible reasons for this publishing practice, and suggests how the legal community and the broader scholarly/professional publishing community might respond.

Why Are Some Law Journal Publishers Not Using the Web to Promote Their Articles?

My new post at Slaw, entitled Finding Hidden Treasure, explores an odd circumstance in legal publishing: certain law journal publishers are not promoting or licensing the articles in their journals on the Web. This post profiles three such journals — which publish articles of interest to lawyers and nonlawyers in multiple jurisdictions — and suggests that opportunities may be lost due to the choice not to use the Web to publicize or license these articles.

Legal Conflicts of Interest Information Resources from Canadian Bar Association

A set of forms and checklists — called The Conflicts of Interest Toolkit — for aiding lawyers in avoiding conflicts of interest prohibited by legal ethics rules, has been published by The Canadian Bar Association Task Force on Conflicts of Interest.

Click here for Dan Pinnington’s Slaw post explaining the context of the toolkit.

Click here for Simon Chester’s new Slaw post on new developments in Canadian legal conflicts of interest policy.

The toolkit materials are provided in PDF and MS Word formats. Because legal ethics compliance systems are increasingly automated, it would be interesting to see a bar association provide a resource like the toolkit as a database available via an open platform, such as MySQL, or as a set of documents encoded in a language more readily processed by software, such as XML, with concepts and entities encoded in RDF. Such versions of the toolkit could be readily incorporated into a range of existing compliance systems and other information systems and integrated with other data, while an RDF version of the toolkit could also be processed by Semantic Web technology.

What Do Citizen Lawmakers Need to Know?

My new post on Slaw is entitled What Do Citizen Lawmakers Need to Know? The post explores the information needs of nonlawyer citizens who are engaged in online lawmaking, in contexts such as eRulemaking, eConsultation respecting proposed legislation or regulations, or legislative or constitutional referenda.

The post is an initial attempt at addressing the question: As more and more citizens engage in lawmaking online, what information do they need to receive in order to understand the meaning and probable effects of proposed laws?

The post identifies 8 major types of information that individuals who are not lawyers arguably need to receive about a proposed law, in order to understand the meaning and likely consequences of that proposed law.

These information types were identified through a preliminary survey of the scholarly literature on the kinds of information about proposed laws that U.S. legislative and administrative counsel give to the nonlawyer official legislators and regulators whom they serve. I took this approach on the basis of two assumptions, both of which are certainly open to question:

1. That these official counseling practices — because they have continued for many decades — likely reflect the nonlawyer official lawmakers’ actual information needs respecting proposed laws; and
2. That the information needs of nonlawyer official lawmakers respecting proposed laws are likely to be very similar — if not identical — to the information needs of nonlawyer citizen lawmakers respecting proposed laws.

This post is the first product of a long-term study of nonlawyer citizens’ participation in online lawmaking. Subsequent research will involve a more extensive literature review, as well as empirical research on a range of issues respecting the information needs of nonlawyer citizens who participate in lawmaking online.

Comments are welcome.

Wilson on Curating Legal Analytical Material

Jason Wilson of Jones McClure Publishing has a thought-provoking new post entitled Curating the Legal Web?, on Slaw.

In this post, Mr. Wilson describes the potential benefits of legal professionals’ using current technology to curate — i.e., evaluate, authenticate, and create quality descriptive metadata for — legal analytical materials. He contends that this is an extremely promising way to introducing innovation in legal publishing.

Jackson on WestlawNext and the State of the Art in Legal Information Systems

Dr. Peter Jackson, Chief Scientist and Vice President of Technology at Thomson Reuters, discusses the new WestlawNext computer-assisted legal research system, and the current state of the art in legal information systems, in a very interesting interview with Jason Wilson of Jones McClure, published today on Slaw, the Canadian legal blog.