5 Creative Ways to Dress Your Law Office for Success

You may make a great first impression on your potential clients, what kind of impression does your law office make? If your office that looks like every other lawyer's office, you potential clients could be underwhelmed. Everybody has seen...



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3 Warning Signs Your New Associates May Not Stick Around

After a long interview process, you've just hired some new associates. Congrats! Now it's time to get to work. As you invest hours and other resources into training your new associates, you'll want to make sure they stay long enough...



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Land: Participatory Fact-Finding: Developing New Directions for Human Rights Investigations Through New Technologies

Molly K. Land of the University of Connecticut has posted Participatory Fact-Finding: Developing New Directions for Human Rights Investigations Through New Technologies , forthcoming in The Future of Human Rights Fact-Finding (Philip Alston & Sarah Knuckey eds., Oxford University Press, 2015).

Here is the abstract:

This chapter considers the way in which broader participation in human rights fact-finding, enabled by the introduction of new technologies, will change the nature of fact-finding itself. Using the example of a participatory mapping project called Map Kibera, the chapter argues that new technologies will change human rights fact-finding by providing opportunities for ordinary individuals to investigate the human rights issues that affect them. ‘Those who were formerly the ‘subjects’ of human rights investigations now have the potential to be agents in their own right. This ‘participatory fact-finding’ may not be as effective in ‘naming and shaming’ states and companies that violate human rights because the absence of the imprimatur of an established organization may render the information collected vulnerable to critique. At the same time, new and more participatory techniques of investigation will be better suited to other forms of accountability. Participatory fact-finding has the potential to be fact-finding as empowerment — the collection of information and documentation of facts as means for empowering those affected by abuses to advocate for their change. Participatory fact-finding will also be more effective in documenting violations of the positive obligation to fulfill rights than traditional fact-finding methods because they offer opportunities for gathering more data than is possible through victim and witness interviewing.

By supporting local participation, new technologies provide an opportunity to bring the practice of human rights fact-finding into greater alignment with human rights principles. Utilizing new technologies to achieve greater participation in human rights fact-finding will allow human rights organizations to ‘practice what they preach’ — to integrate the principle of participation into their own work in addition to recommending it to states and other duty-bearers. There is and will continue to be a significant need for the kind of fact-finding done by large and established international human rights organizations. Yet documentation projects involving citizens have the potential to be a new kind of fact-finding — to look and function differently than fact-finding as generally practiced by the major international non-governmental organizations and the United Nations. By opening up who can participate in investigation, new technologies will not replace established methodologies, but will instead broaden our understanding of what counts as human rights documentation and the purposes such investigations serve.

Filed under: Applications, Technology developments, Technology tools Tagged: Crowdsourcing criminal investigations, Crowdsourcing evidence gathering, Crowdsourcing human rights information, Crowdsourcing human rights investigations, Crowdsourcing legal evidence gathering, Future of Human Rights Fact Finding, Human rights fact finding, Human rights information systems, Legal crowdsourcing, Legal evidence information systems, Legal fact finding, Map Kibera, Molly K. Land, Molly Land, Participatory fact finding, Participatory legal fact finding, The Future of Human Rights Fact Finding



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Tech for Justice Hackathon+ Austin: Results, storify, links, and resources

Tech for Justice Hackathon+ Austin was held February 21-22, 2015 in Austin, Texas, USA.

The event was organized by the Internet Bar Organization.

Video describing the results and winners of the event is available at: http://ift.tt/1afvsDX

Video of the project presentations at the event is at: http://ift.tt/1afvtYv

The Twitter account for the event is @TechForJustice

One Twitter hashtag for the event was #techforjustice

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

Here is a description of the event, from the registration site:

[…] This legal hackathon will gather programmers, lawyers, technologists, UI& UE designers, public and private sector organizations and government agencies to tackle how to allow EVERYONE to avail themselves of our justice system, or to find methods of achieving informal justice.

TECH FOR JUSTICE Hackathon+ Austin is working in partnership with the Texas Supreme Court, the Texas Judicial Council, Texas Legal Services Center, Legal Services Corporation, and more. This hackathon is unique in its direct partnerships with legal and judicial institutions, and will focus on the creation of solutions that will directly apply to the improvement of state court systems, as well as private justice mechanisms.

Participants will spend the weekend of February 21st and 22nd tackling problems and producing proof of concepts and prototypes that will be curated and presented to worldwide audiences. After the Hackathon, participants will be incentivized to continue to develop their ideas through mentoring, data sharing, and public-private partnerships to bring ideas to fruition. […]

Want to attend? Reserve your spot now and let us know if you’re a coder, legal professional, or just want to participate in general.

Want to participate remotely? Sign-up to participate from anywhere in the world.

All registrants will be the first to receive the latest info on the Hackathon and have the opportunity to take part in events prior to the Hackathon.

Want to watch the livestream? Sign up to take a front row virtual seat via our live webcast of the event in Austin. Livestream registration does not allow for participation in the event. If you want to participate, we recommend you sign up for remote participate as soon as possible, as participant numbers will be capped. […]

HT @TechForJustice

Filed under: Applications, Conference resources, Hackathons, Hacking, Storify, Technology developments, Technology tools, Videos Tagged: #LegalHack, #techforjustice, Access to justice technology, Internet Bar Organization, Legal hackathons, Tech for Justice Hackathon+ Austin, Technology for access to justice



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Ky. Attorney Disbarred for Failing to Pay $200K in Child Support

Stay current on your child support obligations, or you might lose your law license. As the ABA Journal reported yesterday, the Supreme Court of Kentucky disbarred Daniel Warren James for failing to pay over $200,000 in child support obligations over...



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5 Annoying Things Courts Need to Stop Doing

Courts move slowly, as Chief Justice Roberts noted in his State of the Federal Judiciary Report earlier this year. Yes, he knows that the Court needs electronic filing and video recording, but for vague or unspecified reasons, they're just not...



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Lawyers: How Can You Tell If a Photo Has Been Photoshopped?

It's been 25 years since a University of Michigan Ph.D. student named Thomas Knoll and his brother John, then a visual effects supervisor at ILM, created a program for displaying images on a black-and-white display. That little program for Mac...



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Tech for Justice Hackathon+ Austin: February 21-22, 2015

Tech for Justice Hackathon+ Austin is scheduled to be held February 21-22, 2015 in Austin, Texas, USA.

Here is a description of the event, from the registration site:

[…] This legal hackathon will gather programmers, lawyers, technologists, UI& UE designers, public and private sector organizations and government agencies to tackle how to allow EVERYONE to avail themselves of our justice system, or to find methods of achieving informal justice.

TECH FOR JUSTICE Hackathon+ Austin is working in partnership with the Texas Supreme Court, the Texas Judicial Council, Texas Legal Services Center, Legal Services Corporation, and more. This hackathon is unique in its direct partnerships with legal and judicial institutions, and will focus on the creation of solutions that will directly apply to the improvement of state court systems, as well as private justice mechanisms.

Participants will spend the weekend of February 21st and 22nd tackling problems and producing proof of concepts and prototypes that will be curated and presented to worldwide audiences. After the Hackathon, participants will be incentivized to continue to develop their ideas through mentoring, data sharing, and public-private partnerships to bring ideas to fruition. […]

Want to attend? Reserve your spot now and let us know if you’re a coder, legal professional, or just want to particpate in general.

Want to participate remotely? Sign-up to participate from anywhere in the world.

All registrants will be the first to receive the latest info on the Hackathon and have the opportunity to take part in events prior to the Hackathon.

Want to watch the livestream? Sign up to take a front row virtual seat via our live webcast of the event in Austin. Livestream registration does not allow for participation in the event. If you want to participate, we recommend you sign up for remote participate as soon as possible, as participant numbers will be capped. […]

Filed under: Applications, Conference Announcements, Hackathons, Hacking, Technology developments, Technology tools Tagged: #LegalHack, Access to justice technology, Legal hackathons, Tech for Justice Hackathon+ Austin, Technology for access to justice



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Legal technology activities at Code Across, February 21-22, 2015, MIT Media Lab, Cambridge, Massachusetts

Legal technology activities, led by Dazza Greenwood’s Computational Law Research and Development Group, are scheduled to be held as part of Code Across 2015, February 21-22, 2015, at MIT Media Lab, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA.

Here is a description from the announcement:

During the weekend of February 21-22, 2015, please join Code for Boston, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, and municipal partners at the MIT Media Lab for a weekend of discussion, civic hacking, and data-driven exploration. The event will take place at the MIT Media Lab in the “Atrium” on the third floor.

The event will bring together government employees, technologists, and community members to focus on civic and social issues that face our local communities including public safety and justice, health and human services, economic development, and citizen engagement. We will also be celebrating open data in MA as part of International Open Data Day.

The Human Dynamics Lab will convene a special interest group both days exploring how Computational Law and Legal Informatics can provide applied solutions for CodeAcross civic and social issues. The Legal group will feature break out sessions to rapid prototype approaches and options. For more information on this special interest group, please contact Dazza Greenwood or contact us here.

Click here for the registration site.

HT @dazzagreenwood

Filed under: Applications, Conference Announcements, Hackathons, Hacking Tagged: #LegalHack, Code Across, Code Across 2015, Code Across Boston, Code Across Boston 2015, Dazza Greenwood, Legal hackathons, Legal hacking, Rapid prototyping of legal technology



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Ruhl and Katz: Measuring, Monitoring, and Managing Legal Complexity

J. B. Ruhl and Daniel Martin Katz have posted Measuring, Monitoring, and Managing Legal Complexity , forthcoming in Iowa Law Review.

Here is the abstract:

The American legal system is often accused of being “too complex.” For example, most Americans believe the Tax Code is too complex. But what does that mean, and how would one prove the Tax Code is too complex? The descriptive claim that an element of law is complex, and the normative claim that it is too complex, should be empirically testable hypotheses, yet in fact very little is known about how to measure legal complexity, much less to monitor and manage it.

Legal scholars have begun to employ the science of complex adaptive systems, also known as complexity science, to probe these kinds of descriptive and normative questions about the legal system. This body of work has focused primarily on developing theories of legal complexity and positing reasons for, and ways of, managing it. Legal scholars thus have skipped the hard part — developing quantitative metrics and methods for measuring and monitoring law’s complexity. But the theory of legal complexity will remain stuck in theory until it moves to the empirical phase of study, and thinking about ways of managing legal complexity is pointless if there is no yardstick for deciding how complex the law should be. In short, the theory of legal complexity cannot be put to work without more robust empirical tools for identifying and keeping track of complexity in legal systems.

This Article explores legal complexity at a depth not previously undertaken in legal scholarship. Part I orients the discussion by briefly reviewing the scholarship using complexity science to develop descriptive, prescriptive, and ethical theories of legal complexity. Parts II through IV then shift to the empirical front, identifying potentially useful metrics and methods for studying legal complexity. Part II draws from complexity science to develop methods that have or might be applied to measure different features of legal complexity, including metrics for agents, trees, networks, computation, feedback, and emergence. Part III proposes methods for monitoring legal complexity over time, in particular by conceptualizing what we call Legal Maps — a multi-layered, active representation of the legal system network at work. Part IV concludes with a preliminary examination of how the measurement and monitoring techniques could inform interventions designed to manage legal complexity through use of currently available machine learning and user interface design technologies.

Filed under: Applications, Articles and papers, Methodology, Statistics, Technology developments Tagged: Daniel Martin Katz, Iowa Law Review, J. B. Ruhl, Legal complexity, Legal maps, Legal network analysis, Legal networks, Legal system network, Measuring legal complexity, Monitoring legal complexity, Statistical methods in legal informatics



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What Do Potential Clients Want to Know? How to Avoid Litigation

The point of most marketing is to solve a problem. Most of the time, the problem is pretty easy. When your product is dog food, the problem you're solving is that dogs need food. Then the strategy comes in: Why...



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Does Your Firm Need a Social Media Manager?

Between Facebook, Twitter, and a website (and, if you've been reading here, podcasts!), maintaining your Internet presence can seem like a full-time job, or at least a half-time job. And, wait, don't you have a law firm to run? All...



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deLevie: Tools for working with FCC legal data: fccrcd.link and ecfs.link

Alan deLevie of 18F has launched two tools for working with legal data from the U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC):

fccrcd.link

• Description:
  
  

  Provides permalinks to the FCC Record

  
  


• Code: http://ift.tt/1zDEjbK

ecfs.link

• Description:
  
  

  A tool for exporting filings from the U.S. Federal Communications Commission as structured data

  
  


• Code: http://ift.tt/1y0jVNH

HT @adelevie (here, here, and here)

Filed under: Applications, Software, Technology developments, Technology tools Tagged: Alan deLevie, ecfs.link, FCC Record, fccrcd.link, Permanent URLs for legal resources, PURLs for legal resources, Telecommunications law information systems, URIs for legal resources, URLs for legal resources



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Farina et al.: Democratic Deliberation in the Wild: The McGill Online Design Studio and the RegulationRoom Project

Cynthia Farina , Hoi Kong , Cheryl Blake , Mary Newhart , and Nik Luka have published Democratic Deliberation in the Wild: The McGill Online Design Studio and the RegulationRoom Project, Fordham Urban Law Journal, 41, 1527-1580 (2014).

The full text appears to be available from commercial vendors.

Here are excerpts from the introduction:

[…] Here we describe two projects, both being conducted by university researchers, that use innovative technological tools to motivate and support broader, better citizen engagement in government decision making. One is a digitally-mediated community-based urban design studio. […] A collaboration among law and urban planning faculty of McGill University and a Montréal community organization, this project aims to involve area residents in the redevelopment of a forty-five acre post-industrial site in Montréal’s midtown Bellechasse sector. […] The second is RegulationRoom.org, an online website that supports informed public participation in the process of making government regulations (rulemaking). […]

[…] the projects […] aim to discover how the digitally empowered citizen-participant can be meaningfully engaged through processes designed to prime deliberative discussion and knowledge production, rather than mere voting and venting.

The Article proceeds as follows: Part I discusses the problematic yet promising relationship between the theory of deliberative democracy and the practice of public participation in government decision making. Part II gives an overview of the MODS Bellechasse project and the RegulationRoom project, and then focuses on how each project uses technology and human effort to lower the principal barriers to broader, better public participation. Part III discusses lessons learned from the projects and identifies challenges that remain. […]

Filed under: Abstracts, Applications, Articles and papers, Policy debates, Technology developments, Technology tools Tagged: Barriers to citizens' participation in erulemaking, Barriers to citizens' participation in lawmaking, CeRI, Cheryl Blake, Citizens' deliberations about proposed laws, Cornell eRulemaking Initiative, Cynthia Farina, Cynthia R. Farina, Deliberative democracy, Democratic deliberation, Democratic deliberation and law, eparticipation systems, erulemaking, erulemaking systems, Fordham Urban Law Journal, Hoi Kong, Mary Newhart, Nik Luka, Regulation Room, RegulationRoom



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Can a Podcast Pay Off for Your Law Practice?

OK, so you have a blog. You have a Twitter account. You have a Pinterest, a Tumblr, an Ello, and even a lawyer Tinder (but we should talk about deleting that soon). What tools are left for solos and small...



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FRAP 32: Do Federal Appellate Briefs Need to Be Shorter?

We've been quietly watching a proposed change to the Federal Rules of Appellate Procedure wind its way through the appropriate channels, wondering if it's worth writing about. As the proposal has gathered steam, it turns out it's created as much...



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Starger: Hacking Mass Incarceration

Colin Starger of the University of Baltimore has posted Hacking Mass Incarceration , at In Progress .

Here are excerpts from the post:

[…] Here at In Progress, we hope to contribute to collective efforts by hacking Supreme Court doctrine. The idea is to open up the law around prisons and make connections to help generate anti-mass incarceration constitutional arguments. What’s more, the goal is to crowdsource the connection-making process. To do this, I am experimenting with doctrinal map designs to facilitate non-specialist learning of complex doctrinal systems.

Last time, I charted out a series of Eighth Amendment doctrinal networks and found them large and unwieldy. It’s not realistic to expect anybody to read over 100 Supreme Court cases while mining for anti-mass-incarceration arguments. So this time, I want to narrow the focus. Below find the 2-degree citation network linking the Court’s 2011 prisoner overcrowding decision Brown v. Plata to 1958′s Trop v. Dulles, a seminal pronouncement about the Eighth Amendment’s meaning as a guarantee of human dignity in light of evolving standards of decency. […]

Note the new design feature of the map above: its interactivity. Click on the map and then click on any of the opinions. You’ll find yourself looking an HTML deck that (a) has a very quick summary of the case holding; and (b) contains links to open resources about the case provided by CourtListener, Cornell Legal Information Institute, Oyez, and the Supreme Court Database. Some of the decks also contain other potentially useful information — check out the Brown v. Plata deck as an example (make sure you tap your right arrow key!).

As the above map demonstrates, legal hacking is a collective activity. If the map helps at all, it is only because it leverages free resources provided by great organizations doing great work. The HTML Deck platform is an especially cool free resource created by Dave Zvenyach, the 2014 DC Legal Hacker of the Year. His example should inspire us all to tinker and build and seek creative solutions. […]

For the map and more details, please see the complete post.

HT @ColinStarger

Filed under: Applications, Technology developments, Technology tools Tagged: Colin Starger, CourtListener, Criminal law information systems, Criminal procedure information systems, DC Legal Hackers, Free access to law, HTML Deck, In Progress, Legal citation maps, Legal citation networks, Legal doctrine maps, Legal doctrine networks, Legal hacking, Legal hacking movement, Legal Information Institute at Cornell University, Open legal data, Oyez Project, Public access to legal information, SCOTUS Mapping Project, Supreme Court Database, Supreme Court Mapping Project, V. David Zvenyach, Visualization of legal information



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Marsden: Open Access to Law – How Soon?

Chris Marsden of the University of Sussex has posted Open Access to Law – How Soon? at the site of the Society for Computers and Law.

Here is the introduction to the post:

Professor Chris Marsden explains what is behind the Openlaws.eu project and explores the current landscape of access to law in the UK.

The law is a slow-moving beast, as are most lawyers (members of this august Society obviously excepted). Yet with more non-professionals appearing before the courts, in an ever more litigious society, but with fewer resources to engage legal professionals, learning something of the law is more important than ever. In a Knowledge Society, citizens can now access information about their surgeon, their school, their university professor, their neighbours – but not the law, with few exceptions. This is untenable; governments worldwide, together with legal professionals and scholars, have in the past two decades made plans to move towards open access to law via the Internet. This article explores how far the English law has moved, and what remains to be done. It concludes by explaining the pan-European openlaws.eu project, which is releasing its beta version in a Salzburg code camp on 20-21 March (the hills may well be alive with the sound of legal hacking). […]

Filed under: Applications, Conference Announcements, Hackathons, Hacking, Policy debates, Technology developments, Technology tools Tagged: Chris Marsden, Free access to law, Legal hackathons, Open legal data, OpenLaws, OpenLaws CodeCamp, OpenLaws.eu, Public access to legal information, Society for Computers and Law



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Hackathon on Police Brutality Data in Los Angeles County: Storify, links, and resources

Hackathon on Police Brutality Data in Los Angeles County was held 14 February 2015 at UCLA, Los Angeles, California, USA.

The event was organized by the UCLA Department of Information Studies and the Police Officer Involved Homicides Project (@POIHomicides).

The Website for the event is at: poihomicides.org/

The schedule for the event is available at: http://ift.tt/1vwoNsW

The data worked on at the event are available at: http://ift.tt/1vwoNt0

Twitter hashtags for the event included #endbrutality and #epbhackathon

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

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

[…] Join us for the UCLA Information Studies Department’s Hackathon on Police Brutality Data in Los Angeles County. The event looks to engage those interested in community organizing, social justice, hacking, data mining with the unique and imperfect data sets regarding police brutality in LA County. This hackathon will examine how police brutality data is captured and disseminated among state and federal organizations and work to bring attention to the existing data, as well as the holes in existing data through data mining and visualization. […]

HT @miriamkp

Filed under: Applications, Conference resources, Data sets, Storify, Technology developments, Technology tools Tagged: #endbrutality, #epbhackathon, #LegalHack, Criminal law data, Criminal law information systems, Hackathon on Police Brutality Data, Hackathon on Police Brutality Data in Los Angeles County, Legal hackathons, Police Officer Involved Homicides Project, UCLA Department of Information Studies



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How to Cut Through Corporate Bureaucracy and Red Tape

Whether you work for a large firm or a small one, you're bound to encounter the bureaucracy in at least some of its glorious forms. At big firms, for instance, corporate policies limit innovation because every action has to performed...



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Lawyers: Do You Need Legal Forms in Spanish?

If your law firm's clients speak Spanish (or deal with Spanish speakers in their course of business), how can you make sure you're speaking to their legal needs? According to the Pew Research Center, Spanish is far and away the...



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El Jelali et al.: Legal retrieval as support to eMediation

Soufiane El Jelali , Elisabetta Fersini , and Enza Messina have published Legal retrieval as support to eMediation: Matching disputant’s case and court decisions , forthcoming in Artificial Intelligence and Law .

Here is the abstract:

The perspective of online dispute resolution (ODR) is to develop an online electronic system aimed at solving out-of-court disputes. Among ODR schemes, eMediation is becoming an important tool for encouraging the positive settlement of an agreement among litigants. The main motivation underlying the adoption of eMediation is the time/cost reduction for the resolution of disputes compared to the ordinary justice system. In the context of eMediation, a fundamental requirement that an ODR system should meet relates to both litigants and mediators, i.e. to enable an informed negotiation by informing the parties about the rights and duties related to the case. In order to match this requirement, we propose an information retrieval system able to retrieve relevant court decisions with respect to the disputant case description. The proposed system combines machine learning and natural language processing techniques to better match disputant case descriptions (informal and concise) with court decisions (formal and verbose). Experimental results confirm the ability of the proposed solution to empower court decision retrieval, enabling therefore a well-informed eMediation process.

Filed under: Applications, Articles and papers, Technology developments Tagged: Artificial intelligence and law, Elisabetta Fersini, emediation, Enza Messina, Legal information retrieval, Legal machine learning, Legal natural language processing, Legal search, Machine learning and law, Natural language processing and law, Online dispute resolution, Online mediation, Soufiane El Jelali



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3 Ways to Make Valentine's Day Pay Off for Your Firm

Love is in the air -- or maybe that's just the air pollution being caused by everyone turning on their fireplaces for a romantic evening at home. After all, Valentine's Day isn't just a holiday for candy companies, florists, and...



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Lauritsen: On balance: Regarding reason-balancing in AI and law

Marc Lauritsen of Capstone Practice Systems has published an article entitled On balance , forthcoming in Artificial Intelligence and Law .

Here is the abstract:

In the course of legal reasoning—whether for purposes of deciding an issue, justifying a decision, predicting how an issue will be decided, or arguing for how it should be decided—one often is required to reach (and assert) conclusions based on a balance of reasons that is not straightforwardly reducible to the application of rules. Recent AI and Law work has modeled reason-balancing, both within and across cases, with set-theoretic and rule- or value-ordering approaches. This article explores a way to model balancing in quantitative terms that may yield new questions, insights, and tools.

The publisher notes:

This work is based on an earlier work: “On Balance,” in Proceedings of the Fourteenth International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Law. […] http://ift.tt/1viz63K

Filed under: Applications, Articles and papers, Technology developments, Technology tools Tagged: Artificial intelligence and law, Marc Lauritsen, Modeling legal reasoning, Reason balancing



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Marijuana DUIs Are On the Rise: Time to Shift Your DUI Practice?

Old and busted: drunken driving. New hotness? Drugged driving. The latest survey conducted by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) found that incidents of driving under the influence of alcohol are down by a third since 2007. That's good...



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Pa. Lawyer Gets $1M Sanction for Introducing Banned Testimony

"Law & Order" is chock full of situations where a lawyer elicits some damning testimony from a witness, the other side objects, and Sam Waterston cheerfully says, "Withdrawn." And what's been heard, while "disregarded," can't really be unheard. That's TV....



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Calls for Papers: Workshops at ICAIL 2015: International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Law

Several calls for papers have been posted for workshops at ICAIL 2015: International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Law, 8 and 12 June 15 at the University of San Diego in San Diego, California, USA:

DESI VI: Sixth Discovery of Electronically Stored Information Workshop: Using Machine Learning and Other Advanced Techniques to Solve Legal Problems in E- Discovery and Information Governance

• Submission deadlines: 10 April 2015: Refereed papers; 1 May 2015: Unrefereed position papers


• Workshop date: 8 June 2015

MWAIL 2015: ICAIL Multilingual Workshop on AI and Law

• Submission deadline: 28 February 2015


• Workshop date: 8 June 2015

ICAIL 2015 Workshop on Automated Detection, Extraction and Analysis of Semantic Information in Legal Texts

• Submission deadline: 15 April 2015


• Workshop date: 12 June 2015

Click here for information about several other workshops, CLE sessions, and tutorials being offered at ICAIL 2015.

Filed under: Applications, Calls for papers, Conference Announcements, Methodology, Research findings, Technology developments, Technology tools, Workshop Tagged: Artificial intelligence and law, Automatic legal information extraction, Automatic processing of legal texts, ICAIL, ICAIL 2015, ICAIL workshops, ICAIL Workshops 2015, Legal information extraction, Legal natural language processing, Legal text processing, Natural language processing and law, Semantic analysis of legal documents



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Katz and Bommarito: Legal Analytics Course: Website, Course Materials, and Code

Daniel Martin Katz and Michael Bommarito of Michigan State University and its ReInvent Law Laboratory have launched a Website for their course entitled Legal Analytics.

The site includes course materials, slides, and code.

The site is described in their recent post at Computational Legal Studies.

Here is the course description, from the course Website:

This intro class is designed to train students to efficiently manage, collect, explore, analyze, and communicate in a legal profession that is increasingly being driven by data.

Our goal is to imbue our students with the capability to understand the process of extracting actionable knowledge from data, to distinguish themselves in legal proceedings involving data or analysis, and assist in firm and in-house management, including billing, case forecasting, process improvement, resource management, and financial operations.

This course assumes prior knowledge of statistics, such as might be obtained in Quantitative Methods for Lawyers or through advanced undergraduate curricula. This class is not for everyone; for many, it will prove to be challenging. With that warning, we encourage you to consider your interest and career aspirations against the unique experience and value of this class. To our knowledge, this is the only existing class that teaches these quantitative skills to lawyers and law students. […]

HT @computational

Filed under: Applications, Courses and curricula, Slides, Software, Technology developments, Technology tools Tagged: Computational Legal Studies, Daniel Martin Katz, Legal analytics, Legal analytics courses, Legal informatics courses, Legal machine learning, Machine learning and law, Michael Bommarito, Michigan State University College of Law



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What Should Your Law Firm's Website Disclaimer Say?

What should your law firm's website disclaimer say? As we've pointed out recently, your website is most likely an attorney communication (unless, of course, it's your personal blog about your favorite jazz musicians). Consequently, it's governed by all the same...



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McGinnis on Computational Jurisprudence

Video has been posted of John O. McGinnis ‘s presentation entitled Computational Jurisprudence , given 29 January 2015 at Stanford Law School, as part of the Stanford CodeX Speaker Series.

Here is the description from the event announcement:

Professor John O. McGinnis will discuss two issues. First, he will describe how machines are coming to disrupt the legal profession. Superstars and specialists in fast changing areas of the law will prosper — and litigators and counselors will continue to profit — but the future of the journeyman lawyer is insecure. He will then discuss in more detail the future of legal search in a world of increasing machine intelligence and its impact on jurisprudence. The key to progress in creating a better computerized legal search engine is to reduce the signal to noise ratio in the link between the user and the search engine. As this ratio decreases, legal search translates the uncompressed form of legal information into an algorithm for predicting the law. The ongoing improvement in legal search is likely to change the optimal form of the law by changing the cost of finding it. In particular, exponential increases in computational power make standards relatively more attractive than rules by decreasing the costs of standards’ application.

The presentation appears to be based on two papers:

• John O. McGinnis and Steven Wasick: Law’s Algorithm


• John O. McGinnis and Russell G. Pearce: The Great Disruption: How Machine Intelligence Will Transform the Role of Lawyers in the Delivery of Legal Services

HT Roland Vogl

Filed under: Applications, Articles and papers, Technology developments, Videos Tagged: Artificial intelligence and law, CodeX Speaker Series, CodeX: The Stanford Center for Legal Informatics, Computational jurisprudence, John O McGinnis, Legal information retrieval, Legal machine learning, Legal search, Machine learning and law



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Whalen: Analysis of Law Professor Twitter Network

Ryan Whalen of Northwestern University has posted The Law Prof Twitter Network 2.0 .

Here are excerpts from the description:

[…] I wrote a short script to read all of the law prof twitter handles included in [Bridget Crawford’s Law Prof Twitter] census (along with a few provided by others individually) and query the twitter API to get the follower lists and statistics for each user. This allowed me to both rank law prof twitterers (because we all know how much people like to rank things) and project them onto an interactive network so we can see how they relate to one another.

To view the network, click through the image below. The law prof network (consisting of following relationships amongst law profs in the census) has 583 nodes and 20709 edges (directed density = 0.061). The entire network (including all of the followers of all of the law profs) is much larger. In total there are 795,399 unique twitter users who follow law profs. […]

Colors in the network correspond to communities detected using the Louvain method. Modularity in the network is 0.336, with 4 communities and a few solo nodes/pairs. […]

For the network diagram, distribution figure, tables, and more details, please see the complete post.

HT @PatentScholar

Filed under: Applications, Methodology, Others' scholarly or sophisticated blogposts, Research findings Tagged: Bridget Crawford, Law professors' social networks, Law professors' Twitter networks, Law professors' use of social media, Law professors' use of social networks, Lawyers use of social media, Lawyers' use of social networks, Legal network analysis, Legal social media, Legal Twitter, Legal Twitter networks, Network analysis and law, Ryan Whalen



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The 10 Strongest Law Firm Brands: Lessons for Small Firms, Solos

Acritas' list of the strongest law firm brands is here! At the top, for the fourth year in a row, is Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom, known to its friends as just plain old "Skadden." The competition for law...



Continue reading this article, and get more law firm business news and information, at FindLaw.com.



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Chen: Modeling Citation and Download Data in Legal Scholarship

James Ming Chen of Michigan State University has posted a newly revised version of Modeling Citation and Download Data in Legal Scholarship .

This revised version of the paper covers data through 2014.

Here is the abstract:

Impact factors among law reviews provide a measure of influence among these journals and the schools that publish them. Downloads from the Social Science Research Network (SSRN) serve a similar function. Bibliometrics is rapidly emerging as a preferred alternative to more subjective assessments of academic prestige and influence. Law should embrace this trend.

This paper evaluates the underlying mathematics of law review impact factors and per-author SSRN download rates by institution. Both of these measures follow the sort of stretched exponential distribution that characterizes many right-skewed distributions found in the natural and social sciences. Indeed, an ordinary exponential distribution — that is, a stretched exponential distribution with an exponent of 1 — generates strikingly accurate, even beautiful, models of both phenomena. Mindful of physicist Hermann Weyl’s admonition that any choice between truth and beauty should favor beauty, I freely admit to sacrificing some marginal improvement in the descriptive accuracy of my model in order to develop the elegant mathematics of the ordinary exponential distribution.

Further elaboration of this model of law review impact factors as an exponential distribution yields the Gini coefficient of the secondary legal literature, to the extent that each journal’s influence is expressed by its impact factor. An identical analysis applies to law school prestige as measured by per-author download rates on SSRN. The remarkable result of this inequality computation is that the Gini coefficient of legal academia, when prestige in this field is modeled according to an ordinary exponential distribution, is exactly 1/2. That outcome that is determined analytically rather than empirically. The inverse Simpson index similarly reflects an exact twofold reduction in the second-order diversity of law review publishing and academic prestige as measured through SSRN downloads. I conclude that modeling law review impact factors and SSRN download rates according to ordinary exponential distributions gives rise to a powerful mathematical tool for assessing influence among law journals and law schools.

HT @chenx064

Filed under: Applications, Articles and papers, Methodology Tagged: Download rates of law journal articles, Impact factors, James Ming Chen, Jim Chen, Legal citation, Legal citation analysis, Legal scholarship, Modeling legal citations, Statistical methods in legal informatics, Statistical methods in legal information studies, Use of legal scholarship



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