Twitter Tip: Keep Separate Accounts for Work and Play

An angry rage tweet by a BigLaw partner, dispatched in response to a popular law blog's sarcasm, made blog headlines, embarrassing both himself and his firm. A P.R. professional made an insensitive and racist joke about AIDS and Africa. She...



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via Strategist http://blogs.findlaw.com/strategist/2014/01/twitter-tip-keep-separate-accounts-for-work-and-play.html

5 Reasons Why Newsletters Should Be a Part of Your Marketing Strategy

We, at FindLaw, take Lawyer Marketing seriously (sorry for the shameless self-promotion sort of). And while we've covered many areas of lawyer marketing from law firm website design, blogging to SEO, we have only one post devoted to newsletters -- and...



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Call for Participation: OASIS Legal Citation Markup (LegalCiteM) Technical Committee

A call for participation has been issued for the OASIS Legal Citation Markup (LegalCiteM) Technical Committee , whose purpose is to “develop an open standard for machine-readable tagging of legal citations.”

The scope of the committee’s work is described in the call as follows:

The LegalCiteM TC will develop an open standard for machine-readable tagging of legal citations. Specifically, the standard will provide a conceptual model, vocabulary, metadata definitions and syntactical structure that:

• Enables cites to be richly tagged while leaving the visible text of the citation undisturbed;


• Works for a broad variety of legal content types including court cases, legislation, regulations, parliamentary documents and legal treatises;


• Supports citations as used in different countries and jurisdictions;


• Allows other metadata to be associated with citations for purposes beyond just linking.

The TC will also define use cases, overviews, sample data sets and such other non-normative content as can help guide implementers and users to develop and adopt the standard.

According to the call, those formally proposing the committee are:

• John Joergensen, Rutgers School of Law


• James Cabral, MTG Management Consultants, LLC


• Ken Hirsh, American Association of Law Libraries


• Monica Palmirani, University of Bologna-CIRSFID


• Wendy Carter , Individual member


• Daniel Bennett , Individual member

For more details, please see the call.

Click here for earlier posts about this committee.

Email discussions concerning the development of this committee are archived at http://ift.tt/1cmRD4m

HT Chet Ensign

Filed under: Calls for participation, Projects, Standards Tagged: Citation of legal authorities, Daniel Bennett, James Cabral, John Joergensen, Ken Hirsh, Legal citation information systems, Legal citation markup, Legal citation markup standards, Legal Citations Technical Committee, Legal information standards, Legal metadata standards, LegalCiteM, LegalCiteM TC, Monica Palmirani, OASIS, OASIS Legal Citation Markup Technical Committee, OASIS Legal Citations Technical Committee, OASIS LegalCiteM, OASIS LegalCiteM TC, Open legal citation standards, Open legal information standards, Open legal metadata standards, Open standards for legal information, Open standards for legal metadata, Universal citation, Wendy Carter



via Legal Informatics Blog http://ift.tt/1cmRBJR

Courtroom Etiquette 101: Speaking to Judges

Nothing is more upsetting to many practiced litigators -- or judges -- than hearing someone address the bench with "Judge." The person in the black robe and gavel-ready is probably by all means a "Judge," but anyone who doesn't want...



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Segev et al.: Analyzing multilingual knowledge innovation in patents

Professor Dr. Aviv Segev , Professor Dr. Jussi Kantola , Chihoon Jung , and Jaehwa Lee have published Analyzing multilingual knowledge innovation in patents , Expert Systems with Applications , 40(17), 7010-7023 (2013).

Here is the abstract:

In the process of analyzing knowledge innovation, it is necessary to identify the existing boundaries of knowledge so as to determine whether knowledge is new – outside these boundaries. For a patent to be granted, all aspects of the patent request must be studied to determine the patent innovation. Knowledge innovation for patent requests depends on analyzing current state of the art in multiple languages. Currently the process is usually limited to the languages and search terms the patent seeker knows. The paper describes a model for representing the patent request by a set of concepts related to a multilingual knowledge ontology. The search for patent knowledge is based on Fuzzy Logic Decision Support and allows a multilingual search. The model was analyzed using a twofold approach: a total of 104,296 patents from the United States Patent and Trademark Office were used to analyze the patent extraction process, and patents from the Korean, US, and Chinese patent offices were used in the analysis of the multilingual decision process. The results display high recall and precision and suggest that increasing the number of languages used only has minor effects on the model results.

Filed under: Applications, Research findings Tagged: Aviv Segeva, Chihoon Junga, Expert Systems with Applications, Fuzzy Logic Decision Support in legal information retrieval, Fuzzy Logic Decision Support in patent information retrieval, Fuzzy Logic Decision Support in patent retrieval, Jaehwa Lee, Jussi Kantolab, Legal information retrieval, Multilingual legal information retrieval, Multilingual patent information retrieval, Multilingual patent retrieval, Ontologies in legal information retrieval, Ontologies in patent information retrieval, Ontologies in patent retrieval



via Legal Informatics Blog http://ift.tt/1chR0ZO

JURIX 2013 Doctoral Consortium and Poster Sessions: Proceedings available free online

Full text of the papers and posters from JURIX 2013 Doctoral Consortium and Poster Sessions are now available:

Session 1: Doctoral Consortium Session

• Latifa Al-Abdulkarim: Dialogue Interactions in Oral Hearings


• Dusko Martic: Online Dispute Resolution for Cloud Computing Services


• Mizanur Rahman: Legal Knowledge Framework for Identifying Water, Energy, Food and Climate Nexus


• Cristiana Santos: Increasing Media Richness in Online Dispute Resolution and the Need for Personal Data Protection


• Eniafe F. Ayetiran: An Intelligent Hybrid Approach for Improving Recall in Electronic Discovery


• Nada Mimouni: Modeling Legal Documents as Typed Linked Data for Relational Querying

Session 2: Poster Session

• Tingting Li, Tina Balke, Marina De Vos, Julian Padget, Ken Satoh: Legal Conflict Detection in Interacting Legal Systems [image of poster]


• Latifa Al-Abdulkarim, Katie Atkinson, Trevor Bench-Capon: From Oral Hearing to Opinion in The U.S. Supreme Court [image of poster]


• Giovanni Sileno, Alexander Boer, Tom Van Engers: Addressing Argumentation Puzzles with Model-based Diagnosis [image of poster]


• Monica Palmirani, Luca Cervone, Octavian Bujor: Legal Rules Modelling Meets the Web [image of poster]


• Federico Costantini: #Unfair #Law: Folksonomies & Law between Openness and Knowledge [image of poster]


• Guido Boella, Luigi di Caro, Livio Robaldo, Andrea Violat: Network Analysis to Support Navigation and Use of Ever-Changing Legislation [image of poster]


• Alan Buabuchachart, Nina Charness, Charness, Katherine Metcalf, Leora Morgenstern: Automated Methods for Extracting and Expanding Lists in Regulatory Text [image of poster]


• Naomi Augara, Nussen Ainswortha, Marta Poblet, John Zeleznikow: Social Media Policy and Non-Profit Organization: Exploring the Legal Ramifications of ‘Being Social’ [image of poster]

JURIX 2013: International Conference on Legal Knowledge and Information Systems was held 11-13 December 2013 in Bologna. Click here for slides of many of the main conference papers.

Filed under: Applications, Articles and papers, Conference papers, Conference proceedings, Conference resources, Posters, Research findings Tagged: International Conference on Legal Knowledge and Information Systems, JURIX, JURIX 2013, JURIX 2013 Doctoral Consortium, JURIX 2013 Poster Session, Legal informatics conferences



via Legal Informatics Blog http://legalinformatics.wordpress.com/2014/01/14/jurix-2013-doctoral-consortium-and-poster-sessions-proceedings-available-free-online/

Jaquith and Kraft: San Francisco Decoded Influences a Proposed Change in the Law

San Francisco Decoded — the free-access-to-law and eparticipation service created by the OpenGov Foundation, led by Seamus Kraft, using The State Decoded free-access-to-law and eparticipation software developed by Waldo Jaquith — has directly influenced a proposed recent change to a San Francisco law, according to recent articles at SFGate and ABC13.

In recent months, San Francisco, California residents have used San Francisco Decoded to read and make online comments about an ordinance regulating certain garages.

One provision of the ordinance prohibits anything except automobiles from being stored in certain garages. Residents used San Francisco Decoded‘s comment function to complain about the provision.

Waldo Jaquith tells us that San Francisco Decoded uses Disqus comment software, which is built into The State Decoded software.

The residents’ comments about the ordinance led a member of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, Mark Farrell, last week to propose a change in the ordinance, to permit bicycles and other things to be stored in garages. A video shows him expressly identifying San Francisco Decoded and the comments posted there as the basis for his proposal.

These events seem to exemplify an increased citizen engagement with the law and an increased responsiveness of government that San Francisco Decoded and The State Decoded were intended to encourage, according to San Francisco Decoded’s “About” page and Waldo Jaquith’s statements about his vision for The State Decoded.

Click here for previous posts about The State Decoded.

Click here for previous posts about the work of the OpenGov Foundation.

HT @FoundOpenGov and @StateDecoded

Filed under: Applications, Case studies, Technology developments, Technology tools Tagged: Citizens online legal communication, Citizens' legal communication, Citizens' participation in lawmaking, Effects of eparticipation, Effects of eparticipation systems, Effects of free access to law, eparticipation, Free access to law, Legislative information systems, Mark Farrell, Online legal communication, Public access to legal information, Public access to legislation, San Francisco Decoded, Seamus Kraft, State Decoded, The State Decoded, Waldo Jaquith



via Legal Informatics Blog http://legalinformatics.wordpress.com/2014/01/14/jaquith-and-kraft-san-francisco-decoded-influences-a-proposed-change-in-the-law/