Legal Software

vineri, 21 martie 2014

Passera: Reports on Legal Design Jams in Milan, February 2014

Stefania Passera of Aalto University has posted reports on two legal design jams that she co-organized with Giogio Trono in February 2014 in Milan:

Legal Design Jam with Domus Academy students @THINGS Milano: Report

Legal Design Jam @Talent Garden Milano: report

According to the Legal Design Jam site:

A Legal Design Jam brings together a group of motivated individuals from different fields (e.g. designers, lawyers, policy-makers, coders, innovators, business people…) and, together, give an extreme user-centric makeover to a legal document. The idea is borrowed from hackathons and service jams, and seeks to engage people to rethink and innovate the very concept of what a legal document should be, look and feel.

Click here for other resources related to the Milan legal design jams.

Click here for information about upcoming legal design jams.

HT @Squarelaw

Filed under: Applications, Conference reports, Hackathons, Hacking, Technology developments, Technology tools Tagged: Civil service law communication systems, Civil service law information systems, Financial law communication systems, Financial law information systems, Financial regulation communication systems, Financial regulation information systems, Giorgio Trono, Legal communication, Legal design, Legal design jams, Legal Design Jams in Milan, Legal hackathons, Legal hacking events, Public law communication systems, Public law information systems, Stefania Passera

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Kraft: DC Decoded beta launched by OpenGov Foundation

DC Decoded , a free-access-to-law and e-participation service for the District of Columbia, has been launched in beta by the OpenGov Foundation , according to an announcement this week by Seamus Kraft of the foundation.

DC Decoded is an implementation of Waldo Jaquith’s The State Decoded platform.

DC Decoded was one of the legal projects worked on at this year’s Open Data Day DC hackathon.

Here is a description of the service:

[...] DCDecoded.org is a non-profit, non-governmental, non-partisan implementation of The State Decoded brought to you by the folks at the OpenGov Foundation. It is part of a broader initiative to bring the law – the most important information in any community – to the people in more accessible, modern formats that can be used and reused. DCDecoded.org provides a platform to display legal information in a friendly, accessible, modern fashion. It is a part of the America Decoded network of legal code sites.

Beta Testing

DCDecoded.org is currently in public beta, which is to say that the site is under active development, with known shortcomings, but it has reached a point where it would benefit from being used by the general public (who one hopes will likewise benefit from it). While every effort is made to ensure that the data provided on DCDecoded.org is accurate and up-to-date, it would be gravely unwise to rely on it for any matter of importance while it is in this beta testing phase.

Many more features are under development, including city council legislation, regulations, calculations of the importance of given laws, inclusion of city attorney’s opinions, court rulings, extensive explanatory text, social media integration, significant navigation enhancements, a vastly expanded built-in glossary of legal terms, scholarly article citations, and much more.

Data Sources

The data that powers DCDecoded.org is also available from the Council of the District of Columbia. The official code is maintained by the District of Columbia and should be the primary reference for any legal questions. Even then, it is always good to consult with a lawyer when interpreting the law.

The data is translated into the State Decoded format using a parser provided by Joshua Tauberer.

An alternative parser is made available by the OpenLawDC organization, and the results can be viewed at dccode.org.

API

The site has a RESTful, JSON-based API. Register for an API key and read the documentation for details. [...]

HT @FoundOpenGov

Filed under: APIs, Applications, Data sets, Projects, Technology developments, Technology tools Tagged: #openlawdc, America Decoded, AmericaDecoded, DC Decoded, DCDecoded, DCDecoded.org, eparticipation, eparticipation systems, Free access to law, Joshua Tauberer, Legal APIs, Legal open data, Legislative information systems, Open legal APIs, Open legal data, Open legislative data, OpenGov Foundation, Public access to legal information, RESTful APIs and legal information systems, Seamus Kraft, State Decoded, The State Decoded, Waldo Jaquith

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Taylor: Building a Legal Research Ontology

Amy Taylor, JD, MLIS, of American University, has posted Building a Legal Research Ontology , at VoxPopuLII .

Here are excerpts from the post:

[...] I further narrowed the focus of the ontology to what we teach 1Ls in basic legal research. We teach them how to research with primary and secondary sources (Type of Research Materials) in the broad categories of law they learn in their IL classes (Area of Law). We teach them about the types of law they will encounter (Type of Law). I also wondered if I could find a way to incorporate all the topics we teach them implicitly. [...] They will need to produce something tangible for a partner or a senior associate or a judge (Final Product). [...] Not only is something tangible expected from them, but they will also need to keep in mind that their work stems from some type of legal action (Legal Action). [...]

Based on this focus, I had five classes: Type of Research Materials; Area of Law; Type of Law; Final Product; and Legal Action. I was fortunate enough to be able to participate in the Sixth Conference on Legal Information: Scholarship and Teaching (known as “The Boulder Conference”) with a working paper on the ontology. Drawing from his work on legal research instruction, Paul Callister suggested I add another class, Type of Research Problem. [...]

My next task was coming up with the terms for the ontology [...]

Selecting the ontology language was the easiest part of the endeavor. I learned about the Ontology Web Language (OWL) at the LII conference. [...]

I also needed a program to build the ontology using the W3C standards and naming conventions. Protege is a free and open-source software program developed and distributed by Stanford University. It comes with extensive user guides. It allows for the creation, sharing and publishing of ontologies, and it uses OWL. [...]

At this point, [...] the ontology’s classes now have subclasses. I am building the relationships between the classes and subclasses, and using Protege to bring them all together. I am also prototyping lesson plans that can take advantage of the ontology. For example, if you write a problem for your students that requires them to research strict tort liability for failure to warn of the danger in the use of a product, you can also use the ontology to bring in the Restatement Third of Torts: Products Liability, as well as secondary sources such as treatises. You can also tie this into whatever final product you want your students to produce: a client letter; a memo to the firm; results of research into punitive damages awards, etc. As long as you have the ontology classes set up, you can add anything to them in order to personalize your research problem.

I also hope to host the ontology on a website with a section for instructors to share lesson plans and ontology files. The files from Protege use an .owl extension, so they can be shared as easily as a pdf. [...]

Click here for video and slides of Amy Taylor’s presentation on this topic at CALICon 2013.

For more details, please see the complete post.

HT @LIICornell

Filed under: Applications, Others' scholarly or sophisticated blogposts, Projects, Technology developments, Technology tools Tagged: Amy Taylor, Legal knowledge representation, Legal ontologies, Legal research ontologies, Legal research ontology, Legal research technology, Legal semantic web, Ontologies of legal research, Ontology of legal research, Semantic Web and law, Technology for legal research, VoxPopuLII

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joi, 20 martie 2014

What's Your Facebook Marketing Strategy in the Pay to Play Era?

"Organic reach" will be slashed to 1 or 2 percent, Valleywag reported. CNET confirmed with the tech giant that the organic reach of Facebook Pages will "decline over time." This sounds important, especially for law firms that maintain active Facebook...

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

via Strategist http://ift.tt/1hHVdu5

Epstein et al.: The “analog” aspects of online public engagement in e-rulemaking

Dmitry Epstein , Mary Newhart , and Rebecca Vernon have published Not by technology alone: The “analog” aspects of online public engagement in policymaking , forthcoming in Government Information Quarterly .

Here is the abstract:

Between Twitter revolutions and Facebook elections, there is a growing belief that information and communication technologies are changing the way democracy is practiced. The discourse around e-government and online deliberation is frequently focused on technical solutions and based in the belief that if you build it correctly they will come. This paper departs from the literature on digital divide to examine barriers to online civic participation in policy deliberation. While most scholarship focuses on identifying and describing those barriers, this study offers an in-depth analysis of what it takes to address them using a particular case study. Based in the tradition of action research, this paper focuses on analysis of practices that evolved in Regulation Room—a research project of CeRI (Cornell eRulemaking Initiative) that works with federal government agencies in helping them engage public in complex policymaking processes. It draws a multidimensional picture of motivation, skill, and general political participation divides; or the “analog” aspects of the digital divide in online civic participation and policy deliberation.

Filed under: Applications, Case studies, Research findings, Technology developments, Technology tools Tagged: Barriers to citizens' participation in erulemaking, Barriers to citizens' participation in lawmaking, Barriers to eparticipation, CeRI, Citizens' legal deliberation about proposed laws, Citizens' legal deliberation about proposed regulations, Citizens' participation in erulemaking, Citizens' participation in lawmaking, Cornell eRulemaking Initiative, Deliberative democracy, Democratic deliberation, Dmitri Epstein, eparticipation, eparticipation systems, erulemaking, erulemaking systems, Government Information Quarterly, Legal communication, Legal deliberation, Legislative information systems, Mary Newhart, Online deliberation, Online legal deliberation, Online legal deliberation systems, Rebecca Vernon, Regulation Room, RegulationRoom, Regulatory communication systems, Regulatory information systems

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WeCite Project, to build a free legal citator

The WeCite Project, to build a free legal citator, will launch on 26 March 2014, at Columbia Law School in New York City.

Here are excerpts of the description:

The revolution will be crowdsourced. If you have a passion for free access to the law and a love of legal research, come join the WeCite Movement and help us build a free legal citator.

In partnership with the Columbia Society for Law, Science and Technology, and the Stanford Center for Legal Informatics, the WeCite Project will be having an event at Columbia Law School. Come to:

lend your expertise to the design of the next generation of citator

meet people who share the love

meet leading minds in the field of legal informatics and legal research

eat drink and be merry

What: WeCite Launch Event

Who: The WeCite project is co-sponsored by the Stanford Center for Legal Informatics and Casetext. The Wecite launch event is hosted in partnership with the Columbia Society for Law, Science and Technology. The event is open to law school professors, librarians and legal informatics specialists, attorneys, and law students.

When: March 26, 2014, 6:30 p.m. – 8:30 p.m.

Where: Columbia Law School, Jerome Greene Hall Room 104

Please bring your appetite and your laptop< [...]