April 26: CodeX FutureLaw 2013 Conference: Tweets and Resources

The CodeX FutureLaw 2013 Conference is being held 26 April 2013 at Stanford Law School, Stanford, California, USA.

The conference focuses ‘on how technology is changing the landscape of the legal profession and the law more broadly. The conference will bring together leading thinkers, entrepreneurs, investors and technologists that are experimenting and actively working to re-architect the future of the law. If you’re of a similar mind, we’d love to have you there.’

Click here for the conference program.

The Twitter hashtag for the conference is #futurelaw

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

The conference Chair was Tim Hwang.

The legal informatics-oriented panels at the conference include:

• Legal Disruption: Why Now? Why Here? What Next?
• Computational Law and Contracts
• Designing Legal Data
• Open Source Legal Practice

Professor Dr. Daniel Martin Katz of Michigan State University and the ReInventLaw Lab will give the closing keynote address.

The conference is sponsored by CodeX: The Stanford Center for Legal Informatics.

Please see the comments to this post for additional resources related to the conference.

Registration open: CodeX FutureLaw 2013: Conference on Technology & Legal Profession, 26 April

Tim Hwang tells us that registration is now open for CodeX FutureLaw 2013, “a conference focusing on how technology is changing the landscape of the legal profession and the law more broadly,” to be held 26 April 2013 at Stanford Law School, Stanford, California, USA.

Tim is Chair of the conference.

The legal informatics topics to be addressed during the conference sessions include:

• Legal Disruption: Why Now? Why Here? What Next?
• Computational Law and Contracts
• Designing Legal Data
• Open Source Legal Practice

Speakers include:

• Itai Gurari of Judicata
• Tony Lai of LawGives
• Daniel Lewis of Ravel Law
• Tim Stanley of Justia
• Ed Walters of Fastcase

For more details, please see the conference Website.

HT Tim Hwang

20-21 January Legal Hackathon re: Trademark Technology, Silicon Valley

Tim Hwang tells us that there will be a legal hackathon focusing on trademark technology, on 20-21 January 2013, in Mountain View, California, USA, sponsored by AttorneyFee.

The Twitter hashtag for the event is #TMHacks

Here is a description of the event:

AttorneyFee is holding its first hackathon ever, and we want you to join us! The event will kick off at 10:00 AM on January 20th and go till the next day at 5:00 PM. Copious amounts of caffeine, pizza, and beer will be provided. Come with a team, or come on your own and join a team. Come with an idea to work on, or join our ideation session in the morning to develop an idea. At the conclusion of the event each team will present their project, and the coolest project will win some swag.

The focus of the hackathon will be trademarks. Why trademarks, you ask? We recently finished building three super valuable APIs for trademarks that we hope will enable more open innovation in the space: (i) the AF TM applications API, (ii) the AF TM attorneys API, and (iii) the AF TM logos API. Together, these three APIs should enable devs to build a slew of cool new apps to disrupt the trademark industry. [...]

For more details, please see the complete announcement.

HT Tim Hwang

Hwang on Scoping Legal Hacking

Tim Hwang of the University of California Berkeley School of Law has posted Letter One: Scoping “Legal Hacking”, at the Robot, Robot & Hwang Blog.

In this post Tim defines the terms “legal hackers” and “legal hacking” respecting three dimensions of meaning: “The Organizational and Human Capital of the Lawyer,” “The Tools of The Lawyer,” and “An Approach Towards The Law.” Respecting the last dimension, he explains:

Lawyers, then, are legal hackers insofar as they play with the law, find loopholes, stretch definitions, and make novel arguments. Technologists are legal hackers insofar as they launch technologies which disrupt existing legal distinctions, subvert the application of law, or otherwise raise questions about the integrity of the system.

For more information, please see the complete post.

Click here for more on recent legal hacking events.

Hwang Profiled by Fast Company

Tim Hwang of the University of California Berkeley School of Law has been profiled by Fast Company, the entrepreneurship magazine, in an article by Adam Bluestein entitled Tim Hwang Isn’t A Lawyer, But He Plays One Online (Fast Company, 3 May 2012).

In the article, Tim comments on legal technology innovation, including his own projects. Here are some excerpts:

I’m working on a toolkit that allows people to use computer code to program the behavior of corporations in the same way that you can program robots. To toolkit can cause a legal entity to generate subsidiaries, transfer assets, close down, and so on. [...]

One thing that got me intrigued about law was that industry-wide it has the same kind of structure as older industries that have been disrupted by technology: a small class of people that’s based on control of information, protected by regulations. Law hasn’t had its Napster moment yet [...]

The idea of Robot Robot & Hwang is to experiment with computers and legal code to disrupt the norms of the industry and give way to something better and more innovative. I have in mind a different approach that brings the kind of big-data analysis we see being applied elsewhere to the law. An example of this is a company called Lex Machina, which does data mining on judges’ records and makes quantitative predictions about what they will do in the future. That sort of stuff is really powerful. It takes the responsibilities and talents attributed to lawyers and gives them to someone else as well. Also, the way forms are done now tend to be pretty flat–with online services you’re mostly just paying for PDF documents, but if it’s, say, a municipal complaint, you could add a tool to file it directly, in a really a simple way.

For more information, please see the complete article.

Please join me in congratulating Tim!

NELIC 2011: New and Emerging Legal Infrastructures Conference

[Update 20 April 2011: Click here for videos of the entire NELIC conference. HT @LSNTAP.]

NELIC 2011: The New and Emerging Legal Infrastructures Conference, will be held 15 April 2011, at the University of California, Berkeley School of Law, Boalt Hall, in Berkeley, California, USA.

According to the announcement, invited speakers will address the following topics:

• “Quantitative Legal Prediction“: such as applying “machine learning” and “natural language processing” to develop “statistical model[s]” of “judicial decision-making”;
• “Legal Financing and Securitization“
• “The Future of Legal Automation“
• “Legal Interfaces and User Experiences“: including implications for access “to the legal system.”

As of today, the speakers include Joshua Walker of Lex Machina; and Daniel Martin Katz of the University of Michigan Center for the Study of Complex Systems.

For registration or more information, please see the conference announcement.