Legal Software: deLevie on Legal Technology and Legal Hacking

sâmbătă, 21 decembrie 2013

deLevie on Legal Technology and Legal Hacking

An interview with software developer and law student Alan deLevie of American University has been posted at LawLytics : Attorneys, Learn To Code (Part II): Interview With A ‘Legal Hacker’ .

Here are excerpts from the interview:

[...] We ended Computer Science Education Week with a conversation with coder-turned-law student Alan deLevie .

[...] As a “Legal Hacker,” deLevie strives to use technology to improve the law, and vice versa.

LawLytics: What do you see as the most important emerging legal tech?

deLevie: [...] anything that adds structure to unstructured text is huge. One example of that is citation extraction, which I think will help form the basis of a lot of intelligent legal systems. Right now, as a law student I can use coding skills to study smarter. I’m building a tool where I can upload my outline with a bunch of case names, and it will returns links to those case names with auto-generated summaries. [...]

What are Legal Hackers?

I co-organize a group called DC Legal Hackers (@DCLegalHackers). The other organizers, Jameson Dempsey and Rebecca Williams , were involved in the New York legal hacking scene at the Brooklyn Law Incubator & Policy Clinic, which is where it all originated. In addition to DC and New York, there are legal hacking groups all over the country.

We like to define a legal hacker as anyone who cares about using technology to improve the law, and vice versa. In this sense, a hacker isn’t someone who gains unauthorized access to anything. It’s a positive mindset where you’re always trying to modify and re-purpose existing systems to your advantage. [...]

What else can learning to code teach attorneys?

Coders are very conscious of how they build and how they work. [...] This focus on process would serve the legal space well. For example, if coders had to pass around a Word doc with Track Changes through attachments [...], they’d [...] propose a move to Dropbox or [...] GitHub or something like that. [...]