5 New Year's Resolutions for Lawyer Introverts

Being a lawyer really isn't a job for an introvert, but we find our niches. We don't like getting up and talking in front of an audience, but we like writing in quiet cubby-holes, doing our jobs without anyone around....



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Workshops on legal aspects of blockchain technology: January 15-16 and 17-18, 2015, Cambridge, Massachusetts

Two workshops on legal aspects of blockchain technologies are scheduled to be held in January 2015 in Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA:

• January 15-16, 2015: Technical and Legal Workshop: Blockchain: Cryptocurrencies and Distributed Ledgers, at MIT Media Lab


• January 17-18, 2015: Berkman Workshop on Crypto-equity and the Law, at Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University

Organizers of these events include Primavera de Filippi , Constance Choi , and Joel Dietz .

These workshops have been announced on the Website of the Berkman Center’s study group on Legal, Social, and Economic Aspects of Cryptoledger-based Technologies.

HT @compleatang

Filed under: Applications, Conference Announcements, Policy debates, Technology developments, Technology tools Tagged: Berkman Workshop on Crypto-equity and the Law, Constance Choi, Cryptoledgers, Distributed autonomous organizations, Ethereum, Joel Dietz, Legal applications of blockchain technology, MIT Media Lab, Primavera de Filippi, Smart contracts, Technical and Legal Workshop: Blockchain: Cryptocurrencies and Distributed Ledgers



via Legal Informatics Blog http://legalinformatics.wordpress.com/2014/12/31/workshops-on-legal-aspects-of-blockchain-technology-january-15-16-and-17-18-2015-cambridge-massachusetts/

How to Say 'No' to Giving a Reference or Recommendation

We've talked about how to write good recommendations, but what happens in that awkward moment when you get a request for a recommendation from someone you really don't want to recommend? It's tough to tell a co-worker or staff member,...



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Call for participation: Legislative Hackathon at Harvard, January 30-February 1, 2015: #Hack4Congress

A call for participation has been issued for #Hack4Congress: A “Not-Just-for-Technologists” Event to Fix Congress with the OpenGov Foundation — a legislative hackathon — which is scheduled to be held January 30-February 1, 2015, at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA.

The event’s Website is available at: http://www.ash.harvard.edu/Home/Challenges-to-Democracy/Events/Hack4Congress

Click here for the registration page.

Sponsors of the event include Harvard Kennedy School Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation, the OpenGov Foundation, the Sunlight Foundation, Congressional Management Foundation, Microsoft New England, Represent.Us, CODE2040, POPVOX, Capitol Bells, and Generation Citizen.

The hackpad for the event is at: https://hackpad.com/HackCongress-kiKLDML5Rr9

Projects to be worked on at the event are listed at: https://hackpad.com/Hack4Congress-kiKLDML5Rr9#:h=Challenges-and-Projects

Data sets, APIs, and examples of apps to be used at the event are listed at: https://hackpad.com/Hack4Congress-Potentially-useful-resources-SBHDs5XMV7Q

One Twitter hashtag for the event appears to be #Hack4Congress

Here is a description, from the event’s Website:

[…] Congress needs “fixes”—but where will these new tools and solutions come from? By bringing together political scientists, technologists, designers, lawyers, organizational psychologists, and lawmakers, #Hack4Congress will help foster new digital tools, policy innovations, and other technology innovations to address the growing dysfunction in Congress.

Help fix Congress! Join political scientists and policy experts, technologists, architects, and designers at #Hack4Congress at Harvard Kennedy School of Government to help identify ideas and innovations to overcome the dysfunction gripping much of Congress. “Hacking” is not just for technologists. “Hacks” include innovations in policy, architecture, organizational process, art and design, and educational materials, as well as new software and technologies.

Solutions presented at the end of the hackathon will be evaluated by a panel of judges. After a second hackathon hosted by The OpenGov Foundation on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C. in spring 2015, the winning teams will have an opportunity to present their projects to lawmakers and other high-level officials inside Congress. Move our democracy forward.[…]

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

HT @FoundOpenGov and @hrgilman

Filed under: Applications, Calls for participation, Conference Announcements, Hackathons, Hacking, Projects, Technology developments, Technology tools Tagged: #Hack4Congress, Archon Fung, Harvard Kennedy School, Hollie Russon Gilman, Legal hackathons, Legislative hackathons, OpenGov Foundation



via Legal Informatics Blog https://legalinformatics.wordpress.com/2014/12/30/legislative-hackathon-at-harvard-january-30-february-1-2015-hack4congress/

Top 10 Legal Writing Blog Posts of 2014

People who watch lawyer shows think that lawyers bluster in a courtroom all day long, but we know what it's really about: Writing. Lots of writing.Throughout 2014, FindLaw's Strategist and Greedy Associates blogs published many notable pieces about legal writing,...



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Fla. Foreclosure Defense Lawyer Holds Contest for a Free House

Christmas miracle? Not quite. Mark Stopa is a defense-side foreclosure lawyer in Florida who wants to give away a house. The deadline to apply has already passed, but we wonder who the lucky winner will be. Stopa announced November 3...



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Final call for papers: ICAIL 2015: International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Law

The final call for papers has been issued for ICAIL 2015: International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Law, being held 8-12 June 2015 at the University of San Diego School of Law in San Diego, California, USA.

Here are the important dates:

• Deadline for submission of abstracts (optional): January 9, 2015


• Deadline for submission of papers: January 16, 2015 (this deadline is hard)


• Deadline for submission of demonstration abstracts: January 23, 2015


• Notification of acceptance: March 13, 2015


• Deadline for submission of doctoral consortium papers: March 31, 2015


• Deadline for final revised and formatted papers: April 17, 2015


• Conference: June 8 – June 12, 2015

Here are excerpts from the call:

[…] Artificial Intelligence and Law is a vibrant research field that focuses on:

• Legal reasoning and development of computational methods of such reasoning


• Applications of AI and other advanced information technologies that are intended to support the legal domain


• Discovery of electronically stored information for legal applications (eDiscovery)


• Machine learning and data mining for legal applications


• Formal models of norms, normative systems, and norm-governed societies

Since it began in 1987, the ICAIL conference has been established as the primary international conference addressing research in Artificial Intelligence and Law. It is organized biennially under the auspices of the International Association for Artificial Intelligence and Law (IAAIL). The conference proceedings are published by ACM. The journal Artificial Intelligence and Lawregularly publishes expanded versions of selected ICAIL papers.

The field serves as an excellent setting for AI researchers to demonstrate the application of their work in a rich, real-world domain. The conference also serves as a venue for researchers to showcase their work on the theoretical foundations of computational models of law. Accordingly, authors are invited to submit papers on a broad spectrum of research topics that include, but are not restricted to:

• Formal and computational models of legal reasoning


• Computational models of argumentation and decision making


• Computational models of evidential reasoning


• Legal reasoning in multi-agent systems


• Knowledge acquisition techniques for the legal domain, including natural language processing and data mining


• Legal knowledge representation including legal ontologies and common sense knowledge


• Automatic legal text classification and summarization


• Automated information extraction from legal databases and texts


• Data mining applied to the legal domain


• Conceptual or model-based legal information retrieval


• E-government, e-democracy and e-justice


• Modeling norms for multi-agent systems


• Modeling negotiation and contract formation


• Online dispute resolution


• Intelligent legal tutoring systems


• Intelligent support systems for the legal domain


• Interdisciplinary applications of legal informatics methods and systems

ICAIL is keen to broaden its scope to include topics of growing importance in artificial intelligence research. Therefore, papers are invited on the following featured categories:

• eDiscovery and eDisclosure


• Open Data and Big Data


• Machine Learning


• Argument Mining

[…]

For more details, please see the complete call for papers.

HT Anne Gardner

Filed under: Calls for papers, Conference Announcements Tagged: Artificial intelligence and law, ICAIL, ICAIL 2015, International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Law, Legal informatics conferences



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Sheridan: Using Data to Understand How the Statute Book Works

John Sheridan of The National Archives has published Using Data to Understand How the Statute Book Works , Legal Information Management , 14, 244-248 (2014).

Here is the abstract:

The statute book is a large, complex system; a vast corpus of texts dating back to the thirteenth century, now evolving at a rate of around 100,000 words a month. The volume and pace of change combine with the constraints of current generation of digital tools to present a real barrier to researchers, limiting the type of research that is currently possible. The statute book is simply too big, and changes too rapidly, for any one person to easily comprehend. This situation is transformed if you view legislation as data, and then apply big data technologies and new data analysis techniques to that data. The aim of the Big Data for Law research project is to do just that; applying the latest analytical techniques to legislation, making it possible to research, interrogate and understand the statute book as a whole system. An important part of the initiative is to make available the raw data for conducting this type of research, alongside new tools and methods for working with the content. In this article, John Sheridan, Head of Legislation Services at The National Archives, sets out some of the ideas that underpin the project and describes the new service that researchers can use from Spring 2015.

Filed under: Applications, Articles and papers, Projects, Technology developments, Technology tools Tagged: #goodlaw, (John Sheridan, AHRC, Arts and Humanities Research Council, Big data and law, Big data and legal information, Big data and legislation, Big data and legislative information systems, Big Data for Law, Good Law Initiative, Legal big data, Legal data, Legal drafting, Legal informatics research projects, Legal information behavior, Legal Information Management, Legal information needs, Legal Linked Data, Legal N-Grams, Legislation.gov.uk, Legislative big data, Legislative data, Legislative drafting, Legislative drafting practices, Legislative information behavior, Legislative information systems, Legislative Linked Data, Legislative N-Grams, Legislative pattern language, Linked Data and law, Linked Data and legislation, N-Grams and legal information, N-Grams and legislative information, National Archives UK, Open legal data, Open legislative data, Pattern language for legislation, Pattern languages and legal information systems, Pattern languages and legislative information systems, Researchers' legal information needs, Tom Bruce, Usage data about legal information systems, Usage data about legislative information systems, Users' legal information needs



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E-Readers, Tablets, Smartphones Are Ruining Your Sleep: Study

Having trouble sleeping at night? Here's the latest culprit: backlit digital screens. According to a recent study conducted by researchers at Harvard Medical School, the blue light from backlit devices (that would be pretty much everything: smartphones, tablets, and most...



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Martin-Bariteau: The Matrix of Law: From Paper, to Word Processing, to Wiki

Florian Martin-Bariteau of the University of Montreal has published The Matrix of Law: From Paper, to Word Processing, to Wiki , Lex Electronica , 19(1) (2014).

Here is the abstract:

Fifteen years ago, François Ost proposed a conceptual framework, known as the “word processing” model, to analyse and understand the evolution of law-making since the advent of the Information Society. This paper presents and discusses the accuracy of this model in the current context. Sketching out regulation as the new underlying logic of postmodern societies’ legal framework and networked law, the paper also draws attention to the phenomenon known as regulatory marketing. Arguing that law is now “in transit” and that the coherence of legal frameworks has been lost, the paper proposes to update François Ost’s word processing model to that of the Wiki, a utopic new paradigm to understand and produce law in the 21st century society.

Filed under: Applications, Articles and papers Tagged: Citizens' participation in lawmaking, eparticipation, Florian Martin-Bariteau, Legal informatics theory, Legal networks, Legislative information systems, Lex Electronica, Networked law, Peer production in law, Peer production in lawmaking, Regulatory marketing, Theory of legal informatics, Wikis and law



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5 Law Firm Marketing Chores for a Slow Time of Year

That time between Christmas and New Year's can be pretty dead in the legal world. Some law firms are open, others aren't. Clients are busy worrying about their own holiday problems. Business is slow. But you're coming into the office...



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Open Law Hacking Project: Results, storify, links, and resources

Results of Open Law — an extended legal hacking project — were announced at a ceremony at DILA in Paris on 17 December 2014 .

The winning applications were:

• First prize: DataAsso , developed by Marc Sallières and Jean Karinthi


• Second prize: PAVlex , developed by Alexandre Delliaux


• Third prize: Groupe Veille juridique : sommaire JORF , developed by Emmanuel Barthe, Julien Martin, Alexandre Delliaux, and Dan Kohn

All applications developed during the Open Law Project are listed at: http://ift.tt/1s6wG6Q

Click here for videos of presentations of the applications, given at an event on 11 December 2014 in Paris.

The Open Law Project Website is at: openlaw.fr/

The project was organized by la Direction de l’information légale et administrative (DILA), Etalab, and NUMA.

Data sets used during the project are listed at: http://ift.tt/1ze7CNI

One Twitter hashtag for the project was #openlaw

Click here for a storify of images and Twitter tweets of the awards ceremony held 17 December 2014.

Click here for a storify of images and Twitter tweets of the project presentations given on 11 December 2014.

Here is a description of the project, from the project’s Website:

Open Law est un programme de cocréation juridique organisé par l’Open World Forum (OWF), la Direction de l’information légale et administrative (DILA), Etalab et le NUMA et lancé le jeudi 30 octobre 2014 lors de l’Open World Forum 2014. Placé sous le signe de l’innovation et de lacollaboration, il a vocation a être alimenté durant toute une année par une multitude d’événements périodiques permettant d’approfondir, préfigurer et prototyper les différents projets et scénarios de services susceptibles d’être coconstruits.

Le programme s’appuie sur les jeux de données récemment diffusés en Open Data en France et a pour ambition de stimuler et dynamiser la réutilisation des données juridiques dans le cadre d’une innovation juridique collaborative et ouverte qui réunit le secteur public et privé.

Les objectifs de ce programme sont de :

• réfléchir à l’exercice, la place et les pratiques entourant le droit dans notre société numérique ;


• rendre plus accessibles certains jeux de données juridiques nouvellement ouverts ;


• créer une communauté de « hackers (coconstructeurs) du droit » ;


• mener des expérimentations autour du cadre juridique de ce type d’événement qui regroupe des acteurs de tout milieu.

Ce programme est ouvert à toute personne désirant contribuer, quelle que soit sa formation, son expérience ou encore ses compétences. […]

Click here for other posts about the project.

HT @dila_tweet

Filed under: Applications, Conference resources, Data sets, Hackathons, Hacking, Projects, Storify, Technology developments, Technology tools, Videos Tagged: #LegalHack, #openlaw, DILA, Droit ouvert, Etalab, Le droit ouvert, Legal hackathons, Legal hacking events, Legal open data, NUMA, Open law, Open legal data, Open World Forum, Stephane Cottin



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Should Your Law Blog Have Comments?

Should your law blog allow for comments? Here are two better questions: Do you want engagement, and do you have time to moderate? You've started a law blog. Good. You write regularly on topics of interest to your target audience....



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Flood and Goodenough: Contract as Automaton: The Computational Representation of Financial Agreements

Mark D. Flood and Oliver R. Goodenough have posted a working paper entitled Contract as Automaton: The Computational Representation of Financial Agreements , on SSRN .

Here is the abstract:

We show that the fundamental legal structure of a well written financial contract follows a state-transition logic that can be formalized mathematically as a finite-state machine (a.k.a. finite-state automaton). The automaton defines the states that a financial relationship can be in, such as “default,” “delinquency,” “performing,” etc., and it defines an alphabet of events that can trigger state transitions, such as “payment arrives,” “due date passes,” etc. The core of a contract thus describes the rules according to which different sequences of event arrivals trigger particular sequences of state transitions in the relationship between the counterparties. By conceptualizing and representing the legal structure of a contract in this way, we expose it to a range of powerful tools and results from the theory of computation. These allow, for example, automated reasoning to determine whether a contract is internally coherent, and whether it is complete relative to a particular event alphabet. We illustrate the process by representing a simple loan agreement as an automaton.

HT @orgoodenough

Filed under: Applications, Articles and papers, Technology developments Tagged: Contract information systems, Contracts as automata, Digital contracts, Digital financial contracts, Electronic contracts, Electronic financial contracts, Financial contract information systems, Finite-state automata, Finite-state machines, Mark D. Flood, Modeling contracts, Modeling contracts as automata, Modeling contracts as finite-state automata, Modeling contracts as finite-state machines, Oliver Goodenough, Oliver R. Goodenough, State-transition logic



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Should Lawyers Take Acting Classes?

Being a trial lawyer is truly a theatrical experience. It involves not only the technical elements of theater, like staging and voice, but also the truly "act-y" parts. What will you say, and when? How will you react to a...



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Lippe, Katz, and Jackson: Legal by Design: A New Paradigm for Handling Complexity in Banking Regulation and Elsewhere in Law

Paul Lippe , Daniel Martin Katz , and Daniel H. Jackson have posted a working paper entitled Legal by Design: A New Paradigm for Handling Complexity in Banking Regulation and Elsewhere in Law , on SSRN .

Here is the abstract:

On August 5, 2014, the Federal Reserve Board and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation criticized shortcomings in the Resolution Plans of the first Systematically Important Financial Institution (SIFI) filers. […]

The Fed and FDIC identified two common shortcomings across the first 11 SIFI filers: “(i) assumptions that the agencies regard as unrealistic or inadequately supported, such as assumptions about the likely behavior of customers, counterparties, investors, central clearing facilities, and regulators, and (ii) the failure to make, or even to identify, the kinds of changes in firm structure and practices that would be necessary to enhance the prospects for orderly resolution.” We believe this regulatory response highlights, in part, the need for lawyers (and other advisors) to develop approaches that can better manage complexity, encompassing modern notions of design, use of technology, and management of complex systems.

In this paper, we will describe the information mapping aspects of the Resolution Planning challenge as an exemplary “Manhattan Project” of law: a critical enterprise that will require — and trigger — the development of new tools and methods for lawyers to apply in their work handling complex problems without resort to unsustainably swelling workforce, and wasteful diversion of resources. Fortunately, much of this approach has already been developed in innovative Silicon Valley legal departments and has been applied by leading banks. Although much of the focus of the Dodd-Frank Act is on re-organizing and simplifying banks, we will focus here on the information architecture issues which underlie much of what should — and will — change about how law is delivered, not just for Resolution Planning, but more broadly.

Among the topics discussed in the paper are the development of a new type of electronic contract, and the application of IBM Watson to complex legal information.

Filed under: Applications, Articles and papers, Technology developments, Technology tools Tagged: Artificial intelligence and law, Banking law information systems, Daniel H. Jackson, Daniel Martin Katz, Digital contracts, Electronic contracts, Financial law information systems, IBM Watson and law, Legal complexity, Paul Lippe



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The Top 10 Strategist Blog Posts of 2014

The 10 most popular posts of 2014 on FindLaw's Strategist blog ran the gamut -- from things you could learn from Frank Underwood to a judge beating a public defender (not in a battle of wits; like, with his fists)....



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DIY Law Firm Website? Here's Your Shopping List

It you build it, they will come. Maybe. If you build it right. And there's a lot that goes into building a law firm website "right": SEO, graphics, mobile-friendly layout, content, conversion optimization, and a whole lot more. But don't...



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New From FindLaw: A Free eBook on Law Firm Marketing

For many lawyers, marketing means handing out a few business cards, maybe setting up a website, and that's it -- if you build the firm, they will come. And once you've established a practice and a reputation, this might be...



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Casanovas et al.: AI Approaches to the Complexity of Legal Systems

Pompeu Casanovas , Ugo Pagallo , Monica Palmirani , and Giovanni Sartor have co-edited a new article collection entitled AI Approaches to the Complexity of Legal Systems: AICOL 2013 International Workshops, AICOL-IV@IVR, Belo Horizonte, Brazil, July 21-27, 2013 and AICOL-V@SINTELNET-JURIX, Bologna, Italy, December 11, 2013, Revised Selected Papers (Springer, 2014).

Here are the contents:

• Pompeu Casanovas, Ugo Pagallo, Monica Palmirani, Giovanni Sartor: Law, Social Intelligence, nMAS and the Semantic Web: An Overview


• Ugo Pagallo: The Legal Roots of Social Intelligence and the Challenges of the Information Revolution


• Fernando Galindo: Methods for Law and ICT: An Approach for the Development of Smart Cities


• Eleonora Bassi, David Leoni, Stefano Leucci, Juan Pane, Lorenzino Vaccari: Opening Public Deliberations: Transparency, Privacy, Anonymisation


• Pompeu Casanovas, John Zeleznikow: Online Dispute Resolution and Models of Relational Law and Justice: A Table of Ethical Principles


• Andrea Ciambra, Pompeu Casanovas: Drafting a Composite Indicator of Validity for Regulatory Models and Legal Systems


• Monica Palmirani, Luca Cervone: Measuring the Complexity of the Legal Order over Time


• Michał Araszkiewicz: Time, Trust and Normative Change. On Certain Sources of Complexity in Judicial Decision-Making


• Alessio Antonini, Cecilia Blengino, Guido Boella, Leendert van der Torre: The Construction of Models and Roles in Normative Systems


• Guido Boella, Silvano Colombo Tosatto, Sepideh Ghanavati, Joris Hulstijn: Integrating Legal-URN and Eunomos: Towards a Comprehensive Compliance Management Solution


• Pedro Miguel Freitas, Francisco Andrade, Paulo Novais: Criminal Liability of Autonomous Agents: From the Unthinkable to the Plausible


• Makoto Nakamura, Yasuhiro Ogawa, Katsuhiko Toyama: Extraction of Legal Definitions and Their Explanations with Accessible Citations


• Marcello Ceci: Representing Judicial Argumentation in the Semantic Web


• Elie Abi-Lahoud, Leona O’Brien, Tom Butler: On the Road to Regulatory Ontologies


• Enrico Francesconi, Ginevra Peruginelli, Ernst Steigenga, Daniela Tiscornia: Conceptual Modeling of Judicial Procedures in the e-Codex Project


• Jorge González-Conejero, Rebeca Varela Figueroa, Juan Muñoz-Gomez, Emma Teodoro: Organized Crime Structure Modelling for European Law Enforcement Agencies Interoperability through Ontologies


• Paulo Novais, Davide Carneiro, Francisco Andrade, José Neves: Harnessing Content and Context for Enhanced Decision Making


• Josep Suquet, Pompeu Casanovas, Xavier Binefa, Oriol Martínez, Adrià Ruiz: Consumedia. Functionalities, Emotion Detection and Automation of Services in a ODR Platform


• Marta Poblet, Esteban García-Cuesta, Pompeu Casanovas: Crowdsourcing Tools for Disaster Management: A Review of Platforms and Methods


• Nuno Luz, Nuno Silva, Paulo Novais: A Method for Defining Human-Machine Micro-task Workflows for Gathering Legal Information

HT Monica Palmirani

Filed under: Applications, Articles and papers, Conference papers, Conference proceedings, Monographs, Research findings, Technology developments, Technology tools Tagged: AICOL, AICOL 2013, AICOL IV, AICOL V, Artificial intelligence and law, Crowdsourcing, e-CODEX, Giovanni Sartor, International Workshop on AI Approaches to the Complexity of Legal Systems, Legal argumentation, Legal complexity, Legal compliance systems, Legal decision support systems, Legal identifiers, Legal informatics conferences, Legal knowledge representation, Legal ontologies, Legal URNs, Measuring legal complexity, Modeling justice, Modeling legal argumentation, Modeling legal arguments, Modeling legal complexity, Modeling legal procedure, Modeling legal procedures, Modeling relational law, Monica Palmirani, Online dispute resolution, Pompeu Casanovas, Ugo Pagallo, Validity of models of legal rules, Validity of models of legal systems



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Ill. Lawyers Suspended for Outsourcing Cases, Misleading Clients

Last week, the Illinois Attorney Registration and Disciplinary Commission suspended two lawyers for two years for a variety of issues in their dealings with low-income clients who were settling debts. They're all somewhat run-of-the-mill violations, except committed on a much...



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Proceedings: NAiL 2014: Second International Workshop on Network Analysis in Law

Full-text proceedings have been posted of NAiL 2014: 2nd International Workshop, “Network Analysis in Law,” held 10 December in Krakow, in conjunction with JURIX 2014.

Here are the contents:

• Kevin Ashley, Elizabeth Ferrell Bjerke, Margaret Potter, Hasan Guclu, Jaromir Savelka and Matthias Grabmair: Statutory Network Analysis plus Information Retrieval


• Tommaso Agnoloni and Ugo Pagallo: The Case Law of the Italian Constitutional Court between Network Theory and Philosophy of Information


• Gabriele Rinaldi and Giacomo Fiumara: Prominent Actors in Italian Civil Judiciary: a Social Network Analysis study


• Alexander Boer and Bas Sijtsma: Semi-Automatic Construction of Skeleton Concept Maps from Case Judgments


• Bart Karstens, Marijn Koolen, Giuseppe Dari Mattiacci, Rens Bod and Tom Ginsburg: Reference Structures of National Constitutions


• Romain Boulet, Ana Flavia Barros-Platiau and Pierre Mazzega: 35 years of Multilateral Environmental Agreements Ratification: a Network Analysis


• John Fitzgerald: Network analysis as an aid to legal interpretation – can counting and drawing rules help lawyers understand the context of those rules?


• Carlo Garbarino: A Model of Legal Systems as Evolutionary Networks: Normative Complexity and Self-organization of Clusters of Rules


• Tõnu Tamme, Leo Võhandu and Ermo Täks: A Method to Compare the Complexity of Legal Acts


• Remo Pareschi, Franco Toffoletto and Paolino Zica: Outcome networks for policy analysis, with an application to a case study in labor law


• Deborah De Felice, Giuseppe Giura and Vilhelm Verendel: Why do you quote me? Citation of Superior Court


• Radboud Winkels, Alexander Boer, Bart Vredebregt and Alexander van Someren: Towards a Legal Recommender System

More information about the event is available at the event Website.

HT @Radboud

Filed under: Applications, Articles and papers, Conference papers, Conference proceedings, Methodology, Research findings, Technology developments, Technology tools Tagged: International Workshop Network Analysis in Law, International Workshop on Network Analysis in Law, JURIX, JURIX 2014, Legal citation network analysis, Legal citation networks, Legal network analysis, Legal networks, Legal social network analysis, Legal social networks, NAiL, NAiL 2014



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Young and Hermida: Computational journalism and crime reporting

Mary Lynn Young and Alfred Hermida have published From Mr. and Mrs. Outlier To Central Tendencies: Computational journalism and crime reporting at the Los Angeles Times , forthcoming in Digital Journalism .

Here is the abstract:

This study examines the impact of computational journalism on the creation and dissemination of crime news. Computational journalism refers to forms of algorithmic, social scientific, and mathematical processes and systems for the production of news. It is one of a series of technological developments that have shaped journalistic work and builds on techniques of computer-assisted reporting and the use of social science tools in journalism. This paper uses the Los Angeles Times’ Homicide Report and its Data Desk as a case study to explore how technological adaptation occurred in this newsroom in the early twenty-first century. Our findings suggest that computational thinking and techniques emerged in a (dis)continuous evolution of organizational norms, practices, content, identities, and technologies that interdependently led to new products. Computational journalism emerges from an earlier and still ongoing turn to digital within broader organizational, technological, and social contexts. We place this finding in the local, situated context of the Homicide Report, one of the first crime news blogs to adopt computational journalism in North America.

HT @hermida

Filed under: Applications, Articles and papers, Case studies, Technology developments, Technology tools Tagged: Alfred Hermida, Computational crime reporting, Computational legal journalism, Crime data journalism, Crime journalism, Crime reporting, Data Desk, Data journalism, Digital Journalism, Homicide Report, Legal data journalism, Legal journalism, Los Angeles Times, Los Angeles Times Data Desk, Los Angeles Times Homicide Report, Mary Lynn Young



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Proceedings: SW4LAW+JURIX-DC 2014: Semantic Web for the Law and Second Jurix Doctoral Consortium

Full text of proceedings have been published jointly for SW4LAW 2014: International Workshop on Semantic Web for the Law, and JURIX-DC 2014: The Second JURIX Doctoral Consortium, both held in December 2014 in Krakow, Poland.

The proceedings have been published free of charge online as volume 1296 in the CEUR Workshop Proceedings Series.

The volume is co-edited by Serena Villata, Silvio Peroni, and Monica Palmirani.

Here are the contents:

SW4LAW 2014: International Workshop on Semantic Web for the Law:

• Serena Villata and Silvio Peroni: Preface


• Dirk Thatmann, Erwin Schuster, Gökhan Coskun: Mapping Legal Requirements to SLAs: An Ontology Based Approach for Cloud-based Service Consumption


• Tara Athan, Guido Governatori, Monica Palmirani, Adrian Paschke, Adam Wyner: Legal Interpretations in LegalRuleML


• Víctor Rodríguez-Doncel, Cristiana Santos, Pompeu Casanovas: Ontology-Driven Legal Support-System in the Air Transport Passenger Domain


• Jakub Nowakowski and Czeslaw Jedrzejek: Logical Model of Guilt as a Part of a Structure of Crime

JURIX-DC 2014: JURIX Doctoral Consortium 2014:

• Monica Palmirani: Preface


• Johannes Scharf: rOWLer – A Hybrid Rule Engine for Legal Reasoning


• Alessandra Malerba: Argumentation Schemes as an Effective Tool in Cases of Double Taxation


• Javed Ahmed: A Privacy Protection Model for Online Social Networks


• Cristiana Santos: Enhancing the Decision Making Process through Relevant Legal Information in Consumer Law Disputes – a Case Study in Air Transport Passenger Rights


• Marco Giacalone: Alternative Cross-Border Dispute Resolutions, from the Past to New Computational Methods (IT Realities)

HT Monica Palmirani

Filed under: Applications, Articles and papers, Conference papers, Conference proceedings, Research findings, Technology developments, Technology tools Tagged: JURIX, JURIX 2014, JURIX Doctoral Consortium, Legal informatics, Legal informatics conferences, Legal knowledge representation, Legal semantic web, Monica Palmirani, Semantic Web and law, Serena Villata, Silvio Perroni, SW4Law, SW4Law 2014



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Open Law Legal Hacking Project: Presentations of results

Presentations of technology projects developed as part of the Open Law legal hacking project were given at an event held 11 December 2014 at DILA in Paris.

Prizes are scheduled to be awarded at an event to be held 17 December 2014 at DILA in Paris.

The Open Law Project is an extended legal hacking project, described in this post.

The projects developed during Open Law are listed at: http://ift.tt/1s6wG6Q

The Website for the Open Law Project, and the data sets used to develop these projects, are available at: openlaw.fr/

The Open Law Project has been organized by la Direction de l’information légale et administrative (DILA), Etalab, and NUMA.

One Twitter hashtag used for the event was #openlaw

Click here for a storify of images and Twitter tweets from the 11 December event.

Here is a description of Open Law Project, from the project’s Website:

Open Law est un programme de cocréation juridique organisé par l’Open World Forum (OWF), la Direction de l’information légale et administrative (DILA), Etalab et le NUMA et lancé le jeudi 30 octobre 2014 lors de l’Open World Forum 2014. Placé sous le signe de l’innovation et de lacollaboration, il a vocation a être alimenté durant toute une année par une multitude d’événements périodiques permettant d’approfondir, préfigurer et prototyper les différents projets et scénarios de services susceptibles d’être coconstruits.

Le programme s’appuie sur les jeux de données récemment diffusés en Open Data en France et a pour ambition de stimuler et dynamiser la réutilisation des données juridiques dans le cadre d’une innovation juridique collaborative et ouverte qui réunit le secteur public et privé.

Les objectifs de ce programme sont de :

• réfléchir à l’exercice, la place et les pratiques entourant le droit dans notre société numérique ;


• rendre plus accessibles certains jeux de données juridiques nouvellement ouverts ;


• créer une communauté de « hackers (coconstructeurs) du droit » ;


• mener des expérimentations autour du cadre juridique de ce type d’événement qui regroupe des acteurs de tout milieu.

Ce programme est ouvert à toute personne désirant contribuer, quelle que soit sa formation, son expérience ou encore ses compétences. […]

HT @b1jam

Filed under: Applications, Conference resources, Hackathons, Hacking, Projects, Technology developments, Technology tools Tagged: #openlaw, DILA, Legal hackathons, Legal hacking events, Open law, Open legal data, Stephane Cottin



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Solo Practitioners: Do You Need a Paralegal?

Paralegals are the unsung heroes of the law office. They handle the logistical aspects of a case, like scheduling and docketing, as well as research and drafting. If you're a solo practitioner, there's a fair chance it's just you, toiling...



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Kan. Attorney Suspended for 'Emotional Blackmail' Over Facebook

Eric Michael Gamble, a lawyer in Kansas City, Kansas, made one big mistake. While representing a biological father who wished to contest the adoption of his daughter, he sent a Facebook message to the unrepresented 18-year-old biological mother urging her...



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Swag for Specialties: Match Firm-Branded Giveaways to Practice Areas

Free pens are so 1995. Who writes things on paper anymore? And calendars? We have these things called smartphones -- they handle our appointments. No, if you want to really impress clients with freebies, you'll need to be different. Step...



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5 Things Lawyers Can Do When the Internet Goes Down

The dreaded spinning circle on your browser tab. That sudden notification that you've been disconnected from your chat program. It can only mean one thing: The Internet is out. Few phrases spawn more fear into a member of the 21st...



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JURIX 2014: International Conference on Legal Knowledge and Information Systems: December 10-12, 2014, Krakow: Links and resources

JURIX 2014: International Conference on Legal Knowledge and Information Systems is being held 10-12 December, at the Jagiellonian University in Krakow, Poland.

The conference Website and program are available at: http://ift.tt/1rljzku

The list of accepted papers is at: http://ift.tt/1D7ZFBx

Links to workshops and tutorials are at: http://ift.tt/1tKag0k

The Twitter hashtags for the conference include #jurix14 and #jurix2014

The Twitter account for the foundation that organizes the conference is: @jurixfoundation

Here is a description of the conference, from the conference Website:

For more than 25 years, the JURIX conference has provided an international forum for academics and practitioners for the advancement of cutting edge research in the interface between law and computer technology. […] We invite submission of original papers on the advanced management of legal information and knowledge, covering foundations, methods, tools, systems and applications. […]

HT @jurixfoundation

Filed under: Applications, Conference Announcements, Conference resources, Research findings, Technology developments Tagged: #jurix14, #jurix2014, Algoritms for legal reasoning, Annotation of legal texts, Artificial intelligence and law, Automatic annotation of legal texts, Inference in legal AIs, Inference in legal expert systems, Inference in legal reasoning, International Conference on Legal Knowledge and Information Systems, JURIX, JURIX 2014, Legal argumentation, Legal expert systems, Legal inference, Legal informatics conferences, Legal information retrieval, Legal instructional technology, Legal knowledge based systems, Legal knowledge management, Legal knowledge representation, Legal Linked Data, Legal natural language processing, Legal network analysis, Legal reasoning algorithms, Legal semantic web, Legal text mining, Legal text processing, Legislative information systems, Linked Data and law, Modeling legal reasoning, Modeling legal rules, Natural language processing and law, Natural language processing and legal texts, Rinke Hoekstra, Semantic Web and law



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5 Things Your Website Does That Will Make Clients Run

The Internet is full of annoying things: annoying people, annoying design tweaks, annoying error messages... Not all of them are ill-intentioned, however. Some of them are actually meant to be helpful -- especially the design errors. But if you do...



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5 Considerations When a Client Wants to Sue the Police

In the wake of the non-indictments in both the Michael Brown and Eric Garner cases, everyone's talking about the possibility of civil suits against the Ferguson, Missouri, and New York City police departments. Those are by no means certain, though....



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Le Hackie Awards 2014: DC Legal Hackers honor leaders and innovations in the legal hacking community

Le Hackie Awards 2014 — an event, organized by DC Legal Hackers, that honored leaders and innovations in the legal hacking community — were held 3 December 2014 in Washington, DC, USA.

One Twitter hashtag for the event was #legalhack

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

Here are the winners of the awards, according to a list sent by Rebecca Williams, co-organizer of DC Legal Hackers:

• Company of the Year: Fastcase, led by Phil Rosenthal and Ed Walters


• Organization of the Year: Free Law Founders, whose many members are listed here


• Legal Hacker of the Year: Dave Zvenyach

Top 10 Legal Hacks of the Year:

• Capitol Bells , founded by Ted Henderson


• Coding for Lawyers , written by Dave Zvenyach


• @CongressEdits , developed by Ed Summers


• Contact Congress , part of The @unitedstates Project


• Free Law Project — Oral Arguments , by Brian Carver and Michael Lissner


• Legal Citation Hackathon , organized by DC Legal Hackers


• Oversight.io , developed by Eric Mill


• Patent Board Ferret , developed by Trent Ostler


• SCOTUS Mapping Project , developed by Colin Starger


• @SCOTUS_servo , developed by Dave Zvenyach

Click here for more information about the legal hacking movement.

HT @DCLegalHackers

Filed under: Applications, Award or prize announcements, Data sets, Software, Storify, Technology developments, Technology tools Tagged: DC Legal Hackers, Innovation in legal technology, Le Hackie Awards, Le Hackie Awards 2014, Legal hacking events, Legal hacking movement, Legal technology innovation



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Blogging Lawyer Gets 3-Year Suspension: Did Lawsuit Play a Role?

Earlier this fall, we brought you the tale of a lawyer filing a copyright lawsuit to prevent a disciplinary board from including text from her blog in a disciplinary complaint. Needless to say, the lawsuit failed. Joanne Denison is back,...



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Should Lawyers Accept Holiday Gifts From Clients?

Even amid reports that it's the season of trampling people to get a cheap TV, it's still the season of giving. Sometimes, this involves giving from a client to a vendor, or, in your case, from a client to you....



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