5 Free Practice Guides for Personal Injury Attorneys

Hey there reader, You know all about our blogs. They're fun, informative, and handy. We attempt to inform about practice tips for small firm practitioners, new attorneys, and in-house counsel. We also lust mightily over gadgets and pontificate on the...



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5 Reasons Why Lawyers and Selfies Just Don't Mix

We recently saw a post on Above the Law about a caption contest for a photo of a lawyer taking a courtroom selfie, and it got us laughing wondering. What the hell was this guy thinking? We could just see...



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Don't Be a Partner in Shelter Tax Crime

This tax season, don't be a partner in shelter tax crime like the attorneys at Nix, Patterson & Roach in Texas. In NPR Investments v. United States, the Fifth Circuit frowned upon the law firm partners' investment scheme to generate...



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Heaton: Good law, nine months on

Richard Heaton of the UK Cabinet Office has posted Good law, nine months on , at the Institute for Government blog.

The post concerns the UK’s Good Law Initiative.

Here are excerpts from the post:

[...] So ‘good law’ [i.e., the UK Government's Good Law Initiative] was a call to potential partners in the fields of policy, law-making, and law-publishing. Between us, we’re responsible for the quality and accessibility of legislation. How can we, in our own fields or working together, promote law that is clear, necessary, coherent, effective and accessible?

Where is good law, nine months on?

We’ve talked to policy makers and lawyers about the importance of clear, simple law, the availability of alternatives to legislation and the drawbacks of unnecessary legislation. We call this the ‘upstream’ work.

Externally, we’ve tried to demystify law and law-making. We enjoyed taking part in Parliament Week. And we’ve launched a new user testing programme to discover what readers find difficult.

But from the start, ‘good law’ was not a consultation exercise around a set of proposals. We wanted to generate interest, and then get help in identifying tasks that would move things forward. So in the autumn, we returned to the Institute with four working groups. Charities, publishers, academics, and volunteers all generously gave their time to analyse problems and develop ideas.

Here are six areas where we will see progress in 2014.

1. Design [...]

2. Drafting tool [...]

3. Explanatory notes [...]

4. Patching the statute book [...]

5. Up to date legislation [...]

6. Mapping the statute book [..]

The section on the drafting tool is especially interesting, because it sets out a vision of an e-participation or crowdsourcing system in which citizens could participate in legislative drafting, similar to that of Speaker John Bercow in his program concerning a Parliament for the 21st Century:

We want a new tool for drafting, amending and publishing legislation that can work in a standard web browser. This is potentially transformational. At present, law drafters, parliamentarians and publishers can’t pool their efforts, or work on the same product. A common platform would mean, for example, that we could easily produce marked-up versions of statutes during a Bill’s passage. We know how helpful it would be if they could see the effect on existing legislation of amendments proposed by a Bill. And what might follow? Direct reader collaboration in the creation of legislative text perhaps? We know that other countries are ahead of us in piloting innovative approaches to law-making: Finland, for example (openministry.info); or Brazil (edemocracia.camara.gov.br).

For more details, please see the complete post.

Click here for earlier posts about the Good Law Initiative.

One reason that the Good Law Initiative is of particular interest to the legal informatics community is that it integrates many of the current trends in legal informatics and legal communication, in a single program, including:

• design


• visualization


• eparticipation


• crowdsourcing


• plain language


• Linked Data


• open legal data


• modeling legal norms in a standards-compliant manner


• increasing free public access to law

HT @AileenWalkerUK

Filed under: Applications, Others' scholarly or sophisticated blogposts, Projects, Technology developments, Technology tools Tagged: #goodlaw, (John Sheridan, Bill drafting editors, Bill drafting software, Bill editors, Citizens' participation in lawmaking, Citizens' participation in legislative drafting, Crowdsourced legislative drafting, Design of legal information systems, Design of legislative information systems, eparticipation, eparticipation systems, Free access to law, Good Law Initiative, Good Law Project, Institute for Government, Institute for Government Blog, John Bercow, Legal crowdsourcing, Legal crowdsourcing systems, Legal design, Legal plain language, Legislative crowdsourcing, Legislative crowdsourcing systems, Linked Data and law, Plain legal language, Richard Heaton



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Daniel and Lauffenburger: Intelligent speed limit assistant

Dr. Jérémie Daniel and Professor Dr. Jean-Philippe Lauffenburger , both of l’Université de Haute-Alsace, have published Fusing navigation and vision information with the Transferable Belief Model: Application to an intelligent speed limit assistant , Information Fusion , 18, 62-77 (2014).

Here is the abstract:

The present paper focuses on the fusion, based on imprecise and uncertain information, between a Geographic Information System (GIS) and a Speed Limit Sign Recognition System (SLSRS), performed on camera images. This study is dedicated to the development of a Speed Limit Assistant (SLA) in the context of vehicle driving aid. The proposed SLA is developed within the Evidence Theory framework. The information from the sources is interpreted as belief functions using a non-antagonistic basic belief assignment (bba) in the Transferable Belief Model (TBM) semantics. This bba ensures that the conflict which could appear after the global fusion is exclusively due to source discordances. The present paper proposes a way to manage these discordances by formalizing a conflict-related constraint decision rule. As far as the application is concerned, a two-level (decentralized) fusion architecture is developed. The sensor relevancy is estimated in a first step, followed by the GIS intra-sensor fusion with a maximum of Credibility decision which determines the context-compliant speed candidate considering the road information given by the digital map. This allows the detection of possible errors of the GIS. The multi-sensor fusion then combines the GIS and SLSRS information considering that the sensors are independent and specialized in one speed, each. For the decision, two strategies are adopted. The first one considers the conflict as a threshold for the final speed selection, and so allows the SLA to stay undecided in case of highly conflicting situations. The second strategy employs the 5th version of the Proportional Conflict Redistribution operator. The SLA has been tested in simulation and in real-time experiments by qualitative and quantitative performance evaluations.

Filed under: Applications, Articles and papers, Research findings Tagged: Conflict-related constraint decision rule, Geographic Information Systems, Information Fusion, Jérémie Daniel, Jean-Philippe Lauffenburger, Legal decision support systems, Legal expert systems, Legal intelligent agents, Proportional Conflict Redistribution, Speed Limit Assistant, Speed Limit Sign Recognition System, Traffic law information systems, Transferable Belief Model



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3 Ways to Have Better Staff Meetings

What's your typical meeting like? Partner walks in, sits at the head of the table, and runs the circus. Associates sit quietly at the end of the table, trying to remain attentive, but they have memos due by 3:00 p.m....



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Judge DQ'd for Ex Parte Facebook 'Friending' of Litigant

Weren't we just discussing judges' use of social media? Oh, but wait, that was on Twitter, a slightly more informal medium than Facebook. A tweet or follow on Twitter isn't anywhere near the same as a Facebook friendship -- especially...



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Carver: It is Long Past Time For Free Online Access to The Law: Free Law Project

Professor Brian W. Carver of the University of California, Berkeley gave a presentation entitled It is Long Past Time For Free Online Access to The Law: Free Law Project , 16 January 2014, at Stanford Law School.

The event was co-sponsored by CodeX: Stanford Center for Legal Informatics as part of the CodeX Speaker Series.

Click here for video of the presentation.

The event announcement is here.

Here is a summary:

The entirety of United States case law is not presently available to the public online for free. These are public domain documents. Why is this still a problem?

Free Law Project is a California non-profit co-founded by UC Berkeley School of Information Professor, Brian W. Carver, and iSchool alumnus, Michael Lissner. The organization provides free public access to primary legal materials, develops legal research tools, and supports academic research on legal corpora. Professor Carver will discuss CourtListener, the project’s web platform for providing public access to court opinions, Juriscraper, the project’s archiving software that collects new court opinions daily, and the project’s bulk and REST APIs that enable others to utilize the nearly 2.5 million court opinions currently freely available through these services. Professor Carver will also discuss some of the questions that academic researchers can best address with bulk access to a large corpora of court opinions.

HT Roland Vogl

Filed under: APIs, Applications, Data sets, Presentations, Technology developments, Technology tools, Videos Tagged: Brian Carver, Brian W. Carver, Bulk access to court decisions, Bulk access to legal data, CodeX Speaker Series, CodeX: The Stanford Center for Legal Informatics, CourtListener, Free access to law, Free Law Project, Juriscraper, Legal APIs, Michael Lissner, Open legal APIs, Public access to court decisions, Public access to legal information, Stanford CodeX



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Francesconi: LEX Naming Convention Implementations

Here is a list of implementations of the LEX Naming Convention (commonly known as URN:LEX), a legal identifier standard. The list was compiled by Professor Dr. Enrico Francesconi , co-developer of the LEX Naming Convention, who kindly allowed me to re-post the list here:

As for the use of LEX naming convention, let me first point out that LEX is available as both URN and http-based (dereferenceable) identifier (see http://ift.tt/MqfDyF Attachment D).

The URN version of the LEX naming convention is mainly meant to be used at institutional level, allowing dynamic discovery services for the legal resources, so to provide reference to different copies of the same act published by different authorities (1-to-n mapping between name and resources).

The http-based version of the LEX naming convention is mainly meant to be used at data provider level to comply with Linked Data principles about dereferenceability of URI (1-to-1 mapping between name and resource).

Both solutions are based on the same LEX metadata set for legal documents identification and provides a solution for multilingual jurisdictions.

As for its use, the LEX naming convention is used by:

• Italian Senate


• Normattiva, the portal of the legislation in-force in Italy


• Italian High Court (Court of Cassation)


• Senado do Brazil


• UK National Archive within the legislation.gov.uk service (as naming convention for back office document management)


• Zotero


• A first prototype of a URN-LEX resolver for France can be found at http://ift.tt/MqfDOY


• LEX is under evaluation by the Swiss Federal Chancellery for the modernization of the Centre for Official Publications (the new service has not been released on the web yet).

Thanks to Professor Dr. Francesconi for allowing us to post this information.

Filed under: Applications, Projects, Standards, Technology developments, Technology tools Tagged: Enrico Francesconi, Legal descriptive metadata, Legal descriptive metadata standards, Legal identifier standards, Legal identifiers, Legal metadata standards, Legal URNs, Legislative identifier standards, Legislative identifiers, Legislative metadata, Legislative metadata standards, LEX identifier standard, LEX Naming Convention, LEX Naming Convention implementations, Uniform Resource Name Namespace for Sources of Law, URN:LEX, URN:LEX implementations, Where is LEX Naming Convention implemented?, Where is URN:LEX implemented?, Who has implemented LEX Naming Convention?, Who has implemented URN:LEX?



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5 Ways to Punch the 'Mondays' in the Face

"Sounds like somebody has a case of the Mondays!" Egad. Just the phrase brings to mind that woman's face, and makes me want to react violently. I suspect I'm not alone, either. That doesn't make her point less true, however....



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Palmirani: Akoma Ntoso Implementations

Here is a list of implementations of Akoma Ntoso, the XML-based structural metadata standard for legal documents, and the Akoma Ntoso Naming Convention, a legal identifier standard. The list was compiled by Professor Dr. Monica Palmirani , co-developer of Akoma Ntoso, who kindly allowed me to re-post the list here:

The Akoma Ntoso naming convention (based on FRBR) usually is adopted jointly with Akoma Ntoso legal xml standard.

[...] Akoma Ntoso, and related URI naming convention, are officially adopted by the following institutional bodies:

• EU Parliament uses Akoma Ntoso for modelling amendments, amendment list, bills, proposals, consolidated version of those documents. EU Parliament manages 24 languages. Status: operative;


• LexML Brazil Project of the Senate. They are using a customization of Akoma Ntoso for the document management and URN:LEX as naming convention. Status: operative;


• Senate of Italy uses Akoma Ntoso for publishing bills in open data. Status: operative [see our earlier post;


• Library Congress of Chile uses Akoma Ntoso for managing debates and recently also bills and acts. Status: operative [see Grant Vergottini and Ari Hershowitz’s post about this at VoxPopuLII ;


• Uruguay Parliament will use Akoma Ntoso for modelling all the law-making process of the bills. Status: it officially adopted Akoma Ntoso for the document management. The project is under construction;


• Federal Chancellery of Switzerland will use Akoma Ntoso for the publication of bills, acts, consolidated code in the Official Journals. Status: it officially adopted Akoma Ntoso for the document management. The project is under construction;


• European Commission. Status: there is the intention to adopt Akoma Ntoso for the document management in order to favour the interoperability with EU Parliament. The project is under construction;


• Nicaragua Assembly will use Akoma Ntoso for managing all the life-cycle of the law-making system. Status: it officially adopted Akoma Ntoso for the document management. The project is under construction;


• Hong Kong Ministry of Justice. Status: the project is under construction and the project manager (Grant Vergottini) is using Akoma Ntoso.


• some relevant experiences in US (California, US code) as back-office document standard. Status: the project is under construction and the project manager (Grant Vergottini) is using Akoma Ntoso;


• Kenya Law Report uses light-dialect of Akoma Ntoso for managing internal document management system. Status: it officially adopted a light version inspired to Akoma Ntoso for the document management. The project is under construction.

Additionally we have some other initiatives that are using Akoma Ntoso (or a dialect inspired to Akoma Ntoso):

• SayIt, by >mySociety


• M5SLazioDevelopment (a customization of liquidfeedback where the document format is Akoma Ntoso)

Filed under: Applications, Projects, Standards, Technology developments, Technology tools Tagged: AKOMA NTOSO, Akoma Ntoso implementations, Akoma Ntoso Naming Convention, Ari Hershowitz, Grant Vergottini, Implementations of Akoma Ntoso, Legal document format standards, Legal document standards, Legal identifier standards, Legal identifiers, Legal IRIs, Legal metadata, Legal metadata standards, Legal structural metadata, Legal URIs, Legal XML, Legal XML standards, Legislative metadata, Legislative structural metadata, Monica Palmirani, Where has Akoma Ntoso been implemented?, Who has implemented Akoma Ntoso?



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European Parliament Hackathon 2014: Links, Tweets, and Resources

The European Parliament Hackathon — which has the complete title of Europarl Hackathon for the European Elections 2014 — was held 24-26 January 2014 in Brussels.

The Twitter hashtag for the event was #hackep

Click here for a storify of Twitter tweets from the event.

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

Here are selected results from the event:

• OpenInterests : A new data set and application for searching declarations of interests by Members of the European Parliament


• Scoring EP (user interface [alpha version], and GitHub repository): An application for analyzing voting on issues by Members of the European Parliament; currently covers climate change only


• List of European Parliament data sources and data visualization tools

According to the event’s Website, the event is supported by Citizens for Europe and Knight-Mozilla OpenNews.

Here are excerpts of the description:

[...] We are inviting coders, activists, graphists and journalists to meet in Brussels on 24-26 January 2014 (last weekend of January) to a Hackathon.

During this weekend we are going to work on several projects aiming at better telling the story of the European Parliament. We will create small groups of 2 to 4 people mixing competencies and having them generate a mini-site, and infographics, a chart… whatever they think is the best tool. We have experience participating in similar “sprints”. It’s intense, includes very little sleep and way too much coffee, furious coding and writing, resulting in lots of energy and the pleasure of having built something in a very short amount of time.

We already have half a dozen signed up and we expect to be between 10 and 20. We don’t want to make it too big, as it needs to stay focussed, but pretty sure I’d love to have you joining in.

What are we going to build?

It’s part of the process for the participants to set the agenda, to decide what to do. Therefore we are going to start the weekend with an “open mike” where anyone can suggest ideas of what they would want to focus on. It could be something “generic”, like a nice visual representation of the European Parliament and highlighting which political party and what country is more present on some Parliamentary Committees and Delegations.

It could be something about gender and illustrate that women are less well represented on some topics, or that some countries still have a long way to go to have better gender balance, or see how the average age of the Members of the European Parliament (MEP) has lowered over time. We have activists that want to join and hope to work on their specific topic (LGBT rights and climate change for instance).

For climate change, we already have a list of specific amendements that are key to understand how MEPs will act, and there are high hopes to be able to use the result of this weekend during the campaign for the elections. What we know is that we will put together a great group of talented and motivated people and let them create what they want. We know the results are going to be more interesting than anything we could have planned beforehand.

What data do we have?

Parltrack has the complete list of all the MEPs, their dossiers and vote history.

Stefan Marsiske, co-organiser of the Hackathon, has done an amazing job of developing and maintaining a software that goes daily on every page of the European Parliament to see if there is any new information and extract it. He has millions of records and he shares them under an open data licence, meaning anyone is free to take the data, analyse it and create something new. Part of the aim of our event is to highlight what can be done with this huge amount of open data and encourage others to do the same. Mepwatch has done the same work on written and oral questions. [...]

For more details, please see the event’s website.

Click here for upcoming and past legal hackathons.

Filed under: Applications, Conference resources, Data sets, Hackathons, Hacking, Storify, Technology developments, Technology tools, Tweet archives Tagged: #hackep, #LegalHack, Citizens for Europe, EuroParl Hackathon, Europarl Hackathon for the European Elections, Europarl Hackathon for the European Elections 2014, European Parliament, European Parliament Hackathon, Knight-Mozilla Open News, Knight-Mozilla OpenNews, Legal hackathons, Legal hacking events, Legislative hackathons, Legislative hacking events, List of European Parliament data sources and data visualization tools, List of European Parliament data sources and dataviz tools, Mepwatch, Open legislative data, Open parliamentary data, OpenInterests, OpenNews, Parliamentary hackathons, Parliamentary hacking events, ParlTrack, ScoringEP, Stefan Marsiske



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Applications invited for fellows at Stanford CodeX: Center for Legal Informatics

Applications are invited for resident fellows at Stanford CodeX: Center for Law Informatics, for the 2014-2015 academic year.

Here is a partial description:

CodeX – The Stanford Center for Legal Informatics is accepting applications for a Resident Fellowship for the 2014-15 academic year. CodeX is a cross-disciplinary research center jointly operated by Stanford Law School and the Stanford School of Engineering. The center’s mission is to explore the application of technology toward improving the quality, efficiency, and accessibility of the legal system. Codex research fellows will have the opportunity to spend one to two years at Stanford Law School collaborating with scholars in computer science and other relevant disciplines. Fellows will work on the center’s existing projects, and will have the opportunity to explore related research on their own and commence new projects. Fellows will work with cutting-edge technologies emerging from Stanford’s engineering departments, and will be expected to bring a legally oriented perspective toward integrating these technologies into the law. Fellows will also be involved in bringing in leading thinkers in the field to speak at the law school on these topic areas and will work with law and computer science students to engage them in the center’s activities.

Qualifications

Because the primary focus of the center is employing technology within the law, applicants should also have experience in the legal, computer science or engineering related fields. We welcome applicants with practical/professional technical experience in these fields as well as those with formal legal, computer science or engineering undergraduate or graduate training. Applicants should be capable of learning and be comfortable with the technological aspects of the center’s projects. [...]

Review of applications will begin immediately, and all applications must be received by March 31, 2014. [...]

For more details, please see the complete announcement.

HT Roland Vogl

Filed under: Fellowships Tagged: CodeX: The Stanford Center for Legal Informatics, Legal informatics fellowships, Roland Vogl, Stanford CodeX



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Call for Papers: SPLeT 2014: Workshop on Semantic Processing of Legal Texts

A call for papers has been issued for SPLeT 2014: Workshop on Semantic Processing of Legal Texts , to be held 31 May 2014, Reykjavik, Iceland.

The submission deadline is 10 February 2014.

The workshop is being held in conjunction with LREC 2014: Language Resources and Evaluation Conference.

Here is the description of SPLeT 2014:

The last few years have seen a growing body of research and practice in the field of AI & Law which addresses a range of topics: automated legal argumentation, semantic and cross-language legal IR, document classification, legal drafting, legal knowledge extraction, as well as the construction of legal ontologies and their application. In this context, it is of paramount importance to use NLP techniques and tools that automate the process of knowledge extraction from legal texts.

Two special sessions will be organized around hot research areas: Legal Language Resources and Enhancing Access to Law.

For what concerns the former, in line with LREC 2014 Special Highlight we encourage the submission of descriptions of legal resources to be possibly included in the LREC Repository of shared LRs with the final aim of constructing a map of legal language resources, enabling their reuse (in reproducing and evaluating experiments) and extension. The resources might include: annotated corpora, lexicons, thesauri and ontologies as well as semantic processing tools, amongst others.

Concerning the second hot topic, we are particularly interested in submissions on NLP-based techniques for getting access to semantic information, including visualization of legal content and network analysis in the legal domain to uncover relationships between legal documents (e.g. citation analysis).

TOPICS OF INTEREST

Topics of interest for the general workshop session include but are not limited to:

• Building legal resources: terminologies, ontologies, corpora


• NLP for legal Open Data


• Ontologies of legal texts


• Information retrieval and extraction from legal texts


• Parsing legal texts


• Semantic annotation of legal texts


• Legal text processing


• Multilingual aspects of legal text semantic processing


• Automatic Classification of legal documents


• Logical analysis of legal language


• Automated parsing and translation of natural language arguments into a logical formalism


• Linguistically-oriented XML mark up of legal arguments


• Dialogue protocols for argumentation


• Legal argument ontology


• Computational theories of argumentation suitable to natural language


• Controlled language systems for law


• Legal interface design and engineering


• Legal education applications

For more details, please see the call.

HT Dr. Giulia Venturi

Filed under: Applications, Calls for papers, Conference Announcements, Technology developments, Technology tools Tagged: Automatic classification of legal documents, Automatic classification of legal texts, Classification of legal texts, Computational theories of argumentation, Computational theories of legal argumentation, Controlled language systems for law, Dialogue protocols for legal arguments, Giulia Venturi, Improving access to law, Legal argument ontologies, Legal argumentation, Legal argumentation markup, Legal arguments, Legal classification, Legal controlled languages, Legal dialogue protocols, Legal educational technology, Legal informatics conferences, Legal information extraction, Legal information retrieval, Legal instructional technology, Legal interface design, Legal knowledge representation, Legal language, Legal language processing, Legal logic, Legal natural language processing, Legal ontologies, Legal open data, Legal search, Legal semantic web, Legal terminologies, Legal text corpora, Legal text mining, Legal text parsing, Legal text processing, Legal user interface design, Legal user interface engineering, Legal user interfaces, Legal XML, Logical analysis of legal language, Logical analysis of legal texts, Markup of legal arguments, Multilingual legal text processing, Natural language processing and law, Parsing legal texts, Processing multilingual legal texts, Semantic annotation of legal texts, Semantic processing of multilingual legal texts, Semantic Web and law, SPLeT, SPLeT 2014, Workshop on Semantic Processing of Legal Texts, XML markup of legal arguments



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EuroLII Observatory

The Website of The EuroLII Observatory is available .

The EuroLII Observatory promotes free access to law in the EU member states.

Here is the mission statement:

The EuroLII Observatory provides not only basic, up-to date information about policies, and standards developments, but also stimulate analyses and discussions. This is a major contribution to public discourse.

Therefore the EuroLII Observatory is a key tool for reflecting on future prospects of free access to law across Europe and developing evidence-based policy making in the EU’s Area of Freedom, Security and Justice.

The Observatory has been launched to:

• improve cooperation in developing free access to legal information in the EU dimension


• identify and spread best practice strategies and enforcement techniques from both the public as well as the private sector


• help raise public awareness about the need of free access to law.

The EuroLII Observatory is supported by a consortium of 14 institutions, many of them members of the Free Access to Law Movement.

The EuroLII Observatory ‘s Website is hosted by ITTIG/CNR.

For more details, please see the site.

HT Dr. Ginevra Peruginelli

Filed under: Projects, Standards Tagged: EU, EU Member States, EuroLII Observatory, European Union, Free access to law, Free access to law movement, Ginevra Peruginelli, ITTIG-CNR, Legal information standards, Legal metadata standards, Open legal data, Public access to legal information



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Saks et al.: The Impact of Neuroimages in the Sentencing Phase of Capital Trials

Professor Dr. Michael J. Saks of Arizona State University, Professor Dr. N. J. Schweitzer of Arizona State University, Dr. Eyal Aharoni of the RAND Corporation, and Professor Dr. Kent A. Kiehl of the University of New Mexico have published The Impact of Neuroimages in the Sentencing Phase of Capital Trials , Journal of Empirical Legal Studies , 11(1), 105-131 (2014).

Here is the abstract:

Although recent research has found that neurological expert testimony is more persuasive than other kinds of expert and nonexpert evidence, no impact has been found for neuroimages beyond that of neurological evidence sans images. Those findings hold true in the context of a mens rea defense and various forms of insanity defenses. The present studies test whether neuroimages afford heightened impact in the penalty phase of capital murder trials. Two mock jury experiments (n = 825 and n = 882) were conducted online using nationally representative samples of persons who were jury eligible and death qualified. Participants were randomly assigned to experimental conditions varying the defendant’s diagnosis (psychopathy, schizophrenia, normal), type of expert evidence supporting the diagnosis (clinical, genetic, neurological sans images, neurological with images), evidence of future dangerousness (high, low), and whether the proponent of the expert evidence was the prosecution (arguing aggravation) or the defense (arguing mitigation). For defendants diagnosed as psychopathic, neuroimages reduced judgments of responsibility and sentences of death. For defendants diagnosed as schizophrenic, neuroimages increased judgments of responsibility; nonimage neurological evidence decreased death sentences and judgments of responsibility and dangerousness. All else equal, psychopaths were more likely to be sentenced to death than schizophrenics. When experts opined that the defendant was dangerous, sentences of death increased. A backfire effect was found such that the offering party produced the opposite result than that being argued for when the expert evidence was clinical, genetic, or nonimage neurological, but when the expert evidence included neuroimages, jurors moved in the direction argued by counsel.

Filed under: Applications, Articles and papers, Research findings Tagged: Empirical methods in legal communication studies, Eyal Aharoni, Influence of evidence on jurors' legal decision making, Influence of visual evidence on jurors' legal decision making, Journal of Empirical Legal Studies, Jurors' legal decision making, Jurors' legal decision making in capital cases, Kent A. Kiehl, Legal communication, Legal communication in capital cases, Legal evidence in capital cases, Legal evidence information systems, Michael J. Saks, N. J. Schweitzer, Neuro images, Neuro images as level evidence, Neuro images in capital cases, Neuroimagery as legal evidence, Trial communication, Visual evidence, Visual legal evidence, Visualization of legal information



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24-26 January: European Parliament Hackathon 2014

The European Parliament Hackathon — which has the complete title of Europarl Hackathon for the European Elections 2014 — is being held 24-26 January 2014 in Brussels.

According to the event’s Website, the event is supported by Citizens for Europe and Knight-Mozilla OpenNews.

Here are excerpts of the description:

[...] We are inviting coders, activists, graphists and journalists to meet in Brussels on 24-26 January 2014 (last weekend of January) to a Hackathon.

During this weekend we are going to work on several projects aiming at better telling the story of the European Parliament. We will create small groups of 2 to 4 people mixing competencies and having them generate a mini-site, and infographics, a chart… whatever they think is the best tool. We have experience participating in similar “sprints”. It’s intense, includes very little sleep and way too much coffee, furious coding and writing, resulting in lots of energy and the pleasure of having built something in a very short amount of time.

We already have half a dozen signed up and we expect to be between 10 and 20. We don’t want to make it too big, as it needs to stay focussed, but pretty sure I’d love to have you joining in.

What are we going to build?

It’s part of the process for the participants to set the agenda, to decide what to do. Therefore we are going to start the weekend with an “open mike” where anyone can suggest ideas of what they would want to focus on. It could be something “generic”, like a nice visual representation of the European Parliament and highlighting which political party and what country is more present on some Parliamentary Committees and Delegations.

It could be something about gender and illustrate that women are less well represented on some topics, or that some countries still have a long way to go to have better gender balance, or see how the average age of the Members of the European Parliament (MEP) has lowered over time. We have activists that want to join and hope to work on their specific topic (LGBT rights and climate change for instance).

For climate change, we already have a list of specific amendements that are key to understand how MEPs will act, and there are high hopes to be able to use the result of this weekend during the campaign for the elections. What we know is that we will put together a great group of talented and motivated people and let them create what they want. We know the results are going to be more interesting than anything we could have planned beforehand.

What data do we have?

Parltrack has the complete list of all the MEPs, their dossiers and vote history.

Stefan Marsiske, co-organiser of the Hackathon, has done an amazing job of developing and maintaining a software that goes daily on every page of the European Parliament to see if there is any new information and extract it. He has millions of records and he shares them under an open data licence, meaning anyone is free to take the data, analyse it and create something new. Part of the aim of our event is to highlight what can be done with this huge amount of open data and encourage others to do the same. Mepwatch has done the same work on written and oral questions. [...]

For more details, please see the event’s website.

Click here for other upcoming legal hackathons.

Filed under: Applications, Data sets, Hackathons, Hacking, Technology developments Tagged: Citizens for Europe, Europarl Hackathon for the European Elections, Europarl Hackathon for the European Elections 2014, European Parliament, European Parliament Hackathon, Knight-Mozilla Open News, Knight-Mozilla OpenNews, Legal hackathons, Legal hacking events, Legislative hackathons, Legislative hacking events, Mepwatch, Open legislative data, Open parliamentary data, OpenNews, Parliamentary hackathons, Parliamentary hacking events, ParlTrack, Stefan Marsiske



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This Lawyer Just Failed Blogging and Social Media Basics

When a lawyer launches a website, he or she obviously needs content. Search engines scan your page for content, and those with fresh, relevant, and insightful offerings get a bump in the search result rankings. Where does that content come from?...



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Legal Blogging: Volokh Now Consumed By a Corporate Mothership

This came out of nowhere. Yesterday morning, one of our favorite legal voices suddenly shifted domains. The Volokh Conspiracy went mainstream media and was consumed by a corporate giant -- Amazon founder Jeff Bezos's Washington Post. Will the libertarians suddenly...



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Hinkle: Legal Constraint in the U.S. Courts of Appeals

Professor Dr. Rachael K. Hinkle of the University of Maryland, Baltimore County has posted Legal Constraint in the U.S. Courts of Appeals .

Here is the abstract:

Existing evidence of law constraining judicial behavior is subject to serious endogeneity concerns. Federal circuit courts offer an opportunity to gain leverage on this problem. A precedent is legally binding within its own circuit, but only persuasive in other circuits. Legal constraint exists to the extent that use of binding precedents is less influenced by ideology than use of persuasive precedents. Focusing on search and seizure cases, I construct a choice set of all published circuit court cases from 1953 to 2010 that cite the Fourth Amendment. I model the use of precedent in cases from 2000 to 2010. The results provide evidence that both the decision about which cases to cite and which cited precedents to treat negatively are constrained by the legal doctrine of stare decisis. Each precedent in the dataset is both binding and persuasive in turn which substantially mitigates endogeneity concerns.

Filed under: Articles and papers, Research findings Tagged: Empirical methods in legal informatics, Influence of ideology on judges' legal decisionmaking, Judges' legal decision making, Judicial decision making, Legal decision making, Legal precedent, Modeling judges' use of legal precedent, Modeling legal precedent, Modeling the use of legal precedent, Rachael Hinkle, Rachael K. Hinkle, SSRN, Stare decisis, Statistical methods in legal informatics



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Haapio and Passera: Design Thinking in Contract Design – Visual Contract Tools

Dr. Helena Haapio and Stefania Passera presented a Webinar entitled Bringing Design Thinking

into Contract Design: Visual Tools for Better Contracting , 14 January 2014.

The event was produced by the International Association for Contract and Commercial Management (IACCM), in its Thought Leadership Webinar series.

Slides of the presentation are available in two parts: Part I, by Helena Haapio,, and Part II: Examples and Cases, by Stefania Passera.

Video of the webinar is available on the IAACM Website (registration required).

Here is an abstract:

[...] Today’s contracts are complex and their meaning is not always clear to those who are impacted. What can we do to provide better usability and to prevent inadvertent non-compliance and negative surprises?

When working together in a research program on User Experience & Usability in Complex Systems (FIMECC UXUS), Helena Haapio and Stefania Passera felt the need to enhance the user experience and usability of contracts. They explored ways to introduce user-centered design into the field of contract design and to merge a proactive approach with design thinking, especially information design and visualization. In this presentation they will discuss research-based criteria of good documents and illustrate, with case studies, how information design and visualization have been applied to improve real-world documents, transforming complex legal texts into easy-to-use information and guidance. Their examples include the development of a visual user guide to the General Terms of Public Procurement of Services in Finland [also called: JYSE Visual Guide (JYSEn Käyttämisopas)] and Legal Design Jams contributing to the production of Wikimedia Foundation’s new, user-friendly trademark policy.

Join this session to see how a fresh approach to design practices can enable your team to produce better contracts and communication, easier for users to understand and act upon.

For more details, please see the event Website.

Filed under: Applications, Slides, Technology developments, Technology tools, Webinars Tagged: Commercial document design, Commercial law communication systems, Commercial law information systems, Contract design, Contract information systems, Contract law communication systems, Contract law information systems, Design of commercial documents, Design of commercial law documents, Design of contract documents, Design of contracts, FIMECC UXUS, General Terms of Public Procurement of Services, Helena Haapio, IACCM, IACCM Thought Leadership Webinar, JYSE Visual Guide, JYSEn Käyttämisopas, Legal communication, Legal contract design, Legal design, Legal design jams, Legal document design, Stefania Passera, User Experience and Usability in Complex Systems, Visual legal communication, Visualization of contract information, Visualization of legal information, Wikimedia Foundation trademark policy



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Two Family Law Ads: One Brilliant, One Miserable Failure

There is nothing rarer than a good lawyer advertisement. We see terrible law ads all the time, but when was the last time you saw an advertisement for legal services and thought, "Man. I wish I had thought of that."...



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3 Ethical Considerations When Dealing With Obnoxious Clients

While attorneys have to put up with plenty from opposing counsel, judges, and witnesses, clients can often be the toughest to handle, with some becoming downright obnoxious. But all lawyers owe their clients certain ethical duties, which can make a...



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Knight and Sutherland awarded research grant to develop Linked Data version of legal classification

F. Tim Knight of York University and Sarah Sutherland of CanLII have won a research grant from the Canadian Association of Law Libraries to “explore the development of KF Modified as a linked data classification scheme,” according to an announcement on the Osgoode Hall Library blog.

Here are excerpts of the announcement:

The 2013 CALL/ACBD (Canadian Association of Law Libraries/Association canadienne des bibliothèques de droit) Research Grant of $3,000 has been awarded to Tim Knight, Head, Technical Services in the Osgoode Library, and Sarah Sutherland, Manager, Content and Partnerships at CanLII, for their project Exploring the Linked Data Application of KF Modified Classification. This project will “explore the development of KF Modified as a linked data classification scheme” involving “analysis of the Library of Congress initiative; developing an appropriate data model for KF Modified; formulating the conversion process; coding the classification data as linked data.”

[...] Linked Data describes a method of publishing structured data so that it can be interlinked and become more useful, using standard web technologies to share information in a way that can be read automatically by computers. This enables data from different sources to be connected and queried. Linked Data is an important component of the new Resource Description and Access (RDA) standard for cataloguing library materials, officially implemented by the Library of Congress, other national libraries (including Library and Archives Canada) and the Osgoode Library in 2013. [...]

HT @parallaxinfo

Filed under: Applications, Grants, Projects, Technology developments, Technology tools Tagged: Association canadienne des bibliothèques de droit, CALL/ACBD Research Grant, CALL/ACBD Research Grant 2013, Canadian Association of Law Libraries, Exploring the Linked Data Application of KF Modified Classification, F Tim Knight, KF Modified, Legal classification systems, Legal descriptive metadata, Legal knowledge representation, Legal Linked Data, Legal metadata, Linked Data and law, Linked Data version of KF Modified, Sarah Sutherland



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Krilenko et al.: Do U.S. Regulators Listen to the Public? Testing the Regulatory Process with the RegRank Algorithm

Professor Dr. Andrei A. Kirilenko of MIT, Professor Dr. Shawn Mankad of the University of Maryland, and Professor Dr. George Michailidis of the University of Michigan, have posted Do U.S. Regulators Listen to the Public?: Testing the Regulatory Process with the RegRank Algorithm .

Here is the abstract:

According to the U.S. Constitution, the government cannot harm a single individual without “the due process of the law.” Things are different, however, if a government action affects multiple individuals. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the government can issue a regulation that can greatly harm many businesses and individuals “without giving them a chance to be heard.” A federal statute called the Administrative Procedure Act mandates that federal regulatory agencies give the public a chance to comment on proposed regulations before they become final. We propose a new analytical tool called RegRank that can be used to measure and test whether government regulatory agencies actually adjust final rules in response to comments received from the public. We use RegRank to analyze the text of public rulemaking documents of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) – a federal regulatory agency in charge of implementing parts of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act. We then test whether the regulatory agency adjusts final rules in the direction of sentiment expressed in public comments. We find strong evidence that it does.

Filed under: Articles and papers, Research findings Tagged: Andrei A. Kirilenko, Citizens' influence on regulations, Citizens' legal communication, Citizens' participation in erulemaking, Citizens' participation in lawmaking, Citizens' participation in rulemaking, erulemaking, erulemaking systems, George Michailidis, Legal communication, Legal sentiment analysis, Legal text analysis, RegRand algorithm, RegRank, Regulatory communication systems, Regulatory information systems, Sentiment analysis, Sentiment analysis about regulations, Sentiment analysis algoritms, Shawn Mankad, SSRN



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LSC TIG 2014: Legal Services Corporation Technology Initiative Grants Conference: Tweets and Resources

LSC TIG 2014: Legal Services Corporation Technology Initiative Grants Conference , was held 15-17 January 2014 in Jacksonville, Florida, USA.

The Twitter hashtags for the event seem to have been #lsctig and #lsctig14

Click here for a storify of Twitter tweets from the event.

Click here for the conference program.

Selected resources related to the event are linked in the comments to this post.

Filed under: Applications, Projects, Storify, Technology developments, Technology tools Tagged: Access to justice, Court technology, Law practice technology, Legal document assembly systems, Legal document assembly systems for pro se litigants, Legal document assembly systems for self represented litigants, Legal games, Legal informatics conferences, Legal Services Corporation Technology Initiative Grants, Legal Services Corporation Technology Initiative Grants Conference, Legal Web portals, Legal web services, LSC TIG, LSC TIG 2014, Online legal aid services, Online legal services, Online legal services delivery, Technology for access to justice, Technology for pro se litigants, Technology for self represented litigants



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Greenspan: New legal document markup and identifier formats: GOLD and LREF

Aaron Greenspan of Think Computer Corporation has posted proposals for a new legal document markup format — called Global Objective Legal Data (GOLD) — and a new legal identifier format — called Legal Reference (LREF) — at the PlainSite blog.

Two LREF Tools are available: a citation converter and table of authorities generator.

Here are excerpts from the description of the GOLD format:

The GOLD Standard would encapsulate legal data free of formatting as just described so that it could be read, exchanged and analyzed by computers as well as humans. In a sense, GOLD is Microsoft Word in a strait jacket. As proposed, each block in a GOLD document is by default a paragraph in a conceptual sense—but it does not have to be a paragraph. GOLD blocks are fundamentally objects with properties [...]

GOLD Standard-compliant files could be encoded in XML or JSON (preferably the latter), and derived automatically by extracting plain text from Microsoft Word documents. We have already developed an internal beta of this technology not yet released, and PlainSite will natively support GOLD data in place of PDF links on its docket pages. The ultimate goal is to have every court use GOLD Standard systems so that one could examine a particular claim in a complaint starting in the lowest court, and follow its progress through subsequent appeals just by looking at an automatically-generated timeline.

Here are excerpts from the description of the LREF format:

[...] legal citations could and should work in the same way as the hyperlink [...]. We propose a legal citation format that works in a similar fashion, but instead of being contained in the venerable HREF parameter, we propose a second and optional parameter for the A tag, called LREF for Legal Reference. LREF links would look like this:

For the docket corresponding to California Northern District Court’s Case No. 5:13-cv-02054-EJD:

docket://gov.uscourts.cand.5-13-cv-02054

For document 5 in the above docket:

docket://gov.uscourts.cand.5-13-cv-02054.5.0

There are several reasons why using the LREF parameter would be advantageous.

1. Simplicity [...]


2. Neutrality [...]


3. Flexibility [...]


4. Specificity [...]


5. International Appeal [...]


6. Readability [...]

For more details, please see the complete posts.

Filed under: Applications, Standards Tagged: Aaron Greenspan, Global Objective Legal Data, GOLD, Legal document formats, Legal document markup formats, Legal identifier converters, Legal identifier resolution systems, Legal identifier resolvers, Legal identifiers, Legal markup, Legal metadata, Legal Reference, Legal structural metadata, Legal table of authority systems, LREF, LREF Tools, PlainSite, Resolvers for legal identifiers



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17-19 January: PDF Liberation Hackathon 2014

Some legal data are being worked on at PDF Liberation Hackathon, being held 17-19 January 2014, in Washington, DC; Buenos Aires; New York City; San Francisco; Chicago; Dayton, Ohio; and online.

According to the event’s Website, “communication between hack sites and with remote participants will generally be via Internet Relay Chat (IRC). We will be using channel #SunlightLabs at freenode.net.”

The Twitter hashtag for the event seems to be #PDFHacks14

Legal data being worked on at the hackathon include:

• New York City crime statistics


• Amnesty International Annual Reports – Torture Incident Database


• Federal Communications Commission Daily Releases


• New York City Council and Community Board Documents

If you know of other legal data sets being worked on at the event, please feel free to identify them in the comments to this post.

Filed under: Articles and papers, Data sets, Hackathons, Hacking, Projects, Technology developments, Technology tools Tagged: Crime data, Crime statistics, Criminal justice information systems, Criminal law information systems, Human rights information systems, Human rights law information systems, Legal hackathons, Legislative data, Legislative information systems, Municipal law information systems, PDF Liberation Hackathon, PDF Liberation Hackathon 2014, Regulatory data, Regulatory information systems, Telecommunications law information systems



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3 Tips: How to Create Simple, Effective Law Firm Newsletters

On Wednesday, we tried to convince you of the importance of adding an email newsletter to your overall marketing strategy. Now that you've jumped on the bandwagon (right?), we'll tell you how to create simple, effective law firm newsletters. All you...



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Security Alert: Bogus Court Emails Carrying Nasty Viruses

You don't have a previously unannounced hearing, it seems. The Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts (AOUSC) just posted a security alert about an ongoing email spam scam (say that three times fast), alerting lawyers about an impeding court hearing....



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Jon Bing, legal informatics pioneer, has died

Professor Dr. Jon Bing , a pioneer in the field of legal informatics, died on 14 January 2014 at the age of 69, according to reports by Olav Torvund, NRK , and Norway Today .

Professor Bing, a faculty member at the University of Oslo Faculty of Law, made highly influential contributions to legal informatics, particularly concerning legal information retrieval.

Among his later works on legal informatics was Let There Be LITE: A Brief History of Legal Information Retrieval , European Journal of Law and Technology, 1(1) (2010).

Lists of Professor Bing’s legal informatics publications are available on Cristin and Google Scholar .

HT Tom Bruce

Filed under: Obituaries Tagged: Jon Bing, Legal information retrieval



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