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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