Prosecutor Facing Discipline for 'Our White World' Closing Statements

Williamson County State's Attorney Charles Garnati has been the court's top prosecutor since 1984. That reign, however, may soon come to an end. The popularly-elected prosecutor could soon be disciplined by the Illinois Attorney Registration and Disciplinary Commission, after the...



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



via Strategist http://blogs.findlaw.com/strategist/2013/12/prosecutor-facing-discipline-for-our-white-world-closing-statements.html

Call for papers: Special Issue of journal Laws, on “Technology, Social Media and Law”

The journal Laws has issued a call for papers for a special issue on “Technology, Social Media and Law”.

The submission deadline is 30 April 2014.

Here is the description:

Guest Editor: Professor Jane Bailey, Common Law Section, University of Ottawa. [...]

This Special Issue of Laws, “Technology, Social Media and Law” focuses on the sometimes complex relationships between technology, social media and law, both in terms of: (i) substantive legal responses to social and cultural issues arising in connection with growing public engagement with technology and social media; and (ii) the procedural impacts and transformative potential of technology on traditional and emerging forms of dispute resolution. Topics might include, but are not limited to:

• cyberbullying


• online harassment


• sexting


• online privacy and surveillance


• social media in the courtroom


• online dispute resolution


• e-discovery


• courtroom technologies


• social media, legal practice and professionalism

Authors working on articles exploring substantive and/or procedural issues arising in relation to technology, social media and law are encouraged to contribute to this issue. We welcome submissions from multiple jurisdictions and are open to a variety of approaches including: analyses of civil, administrative and criminal case law, evaluations of existing and proposed statutory approaches, and examinations of related social science evidence that could inform development of both substantive and procedural legal approaches to issues arising from technology and social media. [...]

For more details, please see the complete call.

Filed under: Calls for papers Tagged: Courtroom technology, ediscovery, Journal Laws, Law practice technology, Laws, Laws Journal, Legal communication and legal ethics, Legal ethics, Legal online social networks, Legal social media, Legal Web 2.0, Online dispute resolution, Online social networks and law, Social media and legal ethics, Web 2.0 and law



via Legal Informatics Blog http://legalinformatics.wordpress.com/2013/12/05/call-for-papers-special-issue-of-journal-laws-on-technology-social-media-and-law/

Racist Law Ad Update: Firm Denies Involvement, Producer Threatens

Okay, this is getting nuts. Last Monday, we handed the award for "worst lawyer commercial ever" to McCutcheon and Hammer, P.C., of Alabama. The award was well deserved, as the commercial starred a white guy pretending to be a Chinese...



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



via Strategist http://blogs.findlaw.com/strategist/2013/12/racist-law-ad-update-firm-denies-involvement-producer-threatens.html

How to Survive That Post-Thanksgiving Weekend Slump

Looking for ways to survive that post-Thanksgiving weekend slump? While it may be mid-week already, some of us might have had a little too much turkey and pumpkin pie (with leftovers to boot) over the past weekend that we are...



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



via Strategist http://blogs.findlaw.com/strategist/2013/12/how-to-survive-that-post-thanksgiving-weekend-slump.html

IJDODR 2013: Symposium on Legal Informatics and Online Dispute Resolution, 4-5 December

IJDODR 2013: IV Simposio de informática jurídica documental y resolución de disputas en línea = The 4th Symposium on Legal Informatics and Online Dispute Resolution, is being held 4-5 December 2013 in Barcelona.

Click here for the conference program.

At the symposium Dr. Núria Casellas of Wolters Kluwer will present a paper entitled Web Semántica y la gestión de documentos jurídicos.

The Twitter hashtag for the symposium appears to be #ijdodr

HT @ncasellas

Filed under: Applications, Articles and papers, Conference Announcements, Conference papers, Conference resources, Technology developments Tagged: IJDODR, IJDODR 2013, Legal informatics conferences, Legal knowledge management, Legal knowledge representation, Legal semantic web, Nuria Casellas, Online dispute resolution, Online dispute resolution conferences, Semantic Web and law, Simposio de informática jurídica documental y resolución de disputas en línea, Symposium on Legal Informatics and Online Dispute Resolution



via Legal Informatics Blog http://legalinformatics.wordpress.com/2013/12/04/ijdodr-2013-symposium-on-legal-informatics-and-online-dispute-resolution-4-5-december/

How to Start a Post-2008 Recession-Proof Law Firm

We recently saw an interview of Bruce Barket* on Bloomberg Law, where he talked about his experience starting a law firm in the post-recession economy. Bucking industry trends, his firm is not shrinking, but growing. Here are some tips that...



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



via Strategist http://blogs.findlaw.com/strategist/2013/12/how-to-start-a-post-2008-recession-proof-law-firm.html

Tran et al.: Automated reference resolution in legal texts

Oanh Thi Tran , Bach Xuan Ngo , Professor Dr. Minh Le Nguyen , and Professor Dr. Akira Shimazu , all of the Japan Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, have published Automated reference resolution in legal texts , forthcoming in Artificial Intelligence and Law .

Here is the abstract:

This paper investigates the task of reference resolution in the legal domain. This is a new interesting task in Legal Engineering research. The goal is to create a system which can automatically detect references and then extracts their referents. Previous work limits itself to detect and resolve references at the document targets. In this paper, we go a step further in trying to resolve references to sub-document targets. Referents extracted are the smallest fragments of texts in documents, rather than the entire documents that contain the referenced texts. Based on analyzing the characteristics of reference phenomena in legal texts, we propose a four-step framework to deal with the task: mention detection, contextual information extraction, antecedent candidate extraction, and antecedent determination. We also show how machine learning methods can be exploited in each step. The final system achieves 80.06 % in the F1 score for detecting references, 85.61 % accuracy for resolving them, and 67.02 % in the F1 score for the end-to-end setting task on the Japanese National Pension Law corpus.

Filed under: Applications, Articles and papers, Research findings, Technology developments Tagged: Akira Shimazu, Artificial intelligence and law, Bach Xuan Ngo, Legal citation detection, Legal citation extraction, Legal citation resolution, Legal citations, Legal machine learning, Legal natural language processing, Legal text processing, Machine learning and law, Machine learning in legal text processing, Minh Le Nguyen, Natural language processing and law, Oanh Thi Tran



via Legal Informatics Blog http://legalinformatics.wordpress.com/2013/12/01/tran-et-al-automated-reference-resolution-in-legal-texts/