Th-th-th-th-that’s All Folks!

…as Porky Pig would say.  This is my last post for my Computer Applications to Law class at the UNSW.  It’s been a great class, although from my own perspective the 8 hour sessions made somewhat difficult to stay focused in the afternoons (whether due to my ‘Steak and Beer’ lunch hour regimen on class days, to the complete lack of thought that went in to designing the UNSW computer labs ’sans air-conditioning’, or to a combination of the two is hard to say;)  To all my faithful readers, this is going to be tough on you, but keep your chins up, I may return someday.

Graeme

Mashups and the legal industry

Just saw an article today on an interesting feature in LawBase’s latest release of their legal focused software suite.  According to John Waters, the company’s LawBase-Google Maps mashup lets “LawBase tap into Google Maps functionality to display its data visually in a geographic context, revealing potentially important patterns that might not be readily discernible in other formats.”

The article pitches some of the ways this feature might be beneficial to the legal industry as:

• Utility and insurance companies using it to track claims resulting from natural disasters or contamination.
• Government agencies using it to better detect fraud.
• Prosecutors using it as an investigative aid.
• Corporate legal departments using it to track (as an example) expiring leases as they plan facilities consolidations.

I don’t know.  Granted, mashups are in their infancy at this stage, and we really haven’t seen many commercial uses for mashups, at least from a business to business perspective, but I can’t really see a need for geographically contextualised data within the legal services arena.  On the other hand, no one could have imagined e-conveyancing, blog-based court procedures, or the myriad other conveniences that the internet has brought about in the legal arena,  so even if this tool isn’t embraced, I have no doubt that there will be mashups introduced (that don’t perhaps attempt to integrate geographical and legal data) that have an effect on the way law is practiced.

Response to Thoughts On….

I was going to post this on Adam Shell’s blog in response to his post Parlez-vous anglais ? Sprechen Sie Englisch? Вы говорите английскую язык? Μιλάτε τα αγγλικά; (it’s about the limitations of legal rule systems that are created in english for use in non-english speaking contexts – go read it – I’ll still be here when you get back. No really, go) If you click on the link to try and post a response, you’re whisked off to some magical 400 Bad Request Error land – same goes for when you click on the link to his post (the full title) that I’ve included above – I’m guessing this is caused by Adam’s use of non-english characters in his title not playing nicely with the html code generated for the link by WordPress.

This is a good example of a difficulty that may be experienced in trying to port an expert legal system to another language, which leads me to the point I was going to make on Adam’s blog; In Canada, by virtue of our two official languages, we are faced with a situation whereby legislation is created in both english and french, neither one is viewed as paramount over the other, and each is to be interpreted in light of the other. We call this the equal authenticity rule (by we I mean me and Supreme Court Justice Basterache) and it means that any expert legal system would need to account for both the english and french meanings of legislation and how they alter each other’s prima facie meaning. If you don’t speak more than one language it may not be immediately apparent that it is impossible to create a document in two languages that is literally the same. Some words exist in one language that simply do not in another. (a simple example of this is the french version of the word goodbye, ‘au revoir’, does not mean goodbye, it means literally ‘to re-see’ kind of a french ‘until we meet again’) In this light, it seems that it would be quite difficult to implement an expert legal system that is bilingual and deals with two versions of a single piece of legislation. An expert legal system niche feature that would be pretty useful in this context, however, might be one that identified incongruencies between the two versions of legislation relating to any case you’re working on.

Blog Trials are coming

At least to South Korea.  Kim Tong-hyung of the Korea Times reported back in April of this year that:

Weblogs, or Internet diaries, are about to gain more than just curious readers. Korean courts are now experimenting whether they could operate court trials and hearings just through Internet postings, saving everybody the trouble of actually entering the courtroom.

The Seoul Administration Court recently designated one of its court units, which rules on labor-management relations and industrial accidents, to develop a prototype model for Internet-based trial models by the end of this month.

Although the court has not yet decided on a detailed framework, it plans to allow the parties in lawsuits to submit their list of evidence, legal documents and other data on Weblogs or Internet message boards to be operated by the court. The court decisions will also be announced online.

The court also plans to allow people to buy court documents and other requirements in preparing for their lawsuits through the Internet by credit card or mobile-phone payments.

Korea has one of the largest Internet populations in the world, with the penetration rate reaching over 70 percent. (see the rest of the article here)

This isn’t new news, (is news news if it isn’t new?) but ties in nicely with the topics covered in Our class last Saturday. I tell ya, blogging is going to be an essential part of our jobs, better get used to it. Someday soon, after a rough day in blog court, you and I will have to hook up for a quick virtual drink in the Lawbby.

Websites and law firms

The class discussion on Saturday reminded me of a summer internship that I applied for in Edmonton a couple of years ago.  The firm was headed by a very respected criminal law attorney who also lectured at the University of Alberta.  In preparing for the interview I took a quick look at the firm’s website only to find an empty index page.  This seemed a bit strange to me as the email addresses for the firm worked fine, so I mentioned it when I went in to the interview.  The partner interviewing me told me that it was a conscious decision on their part not to have a website – they felt it would be a debasing move that would associate the firm with the riffraff hanging out in the full page ad section of the Yellow Pages legal services section.  While I’m sure that this works fine for his firm, as their reputation ensures that there is no shortage of business, it seems an odd choice to not even put up a basic contact information page.   This is a pretty old school attitude to the internet – to be honest, I was surprised that the site was still vacant when I was writing this up – I guess not everyone is willing to be dragged into embracing the internet.  On the other hand, what kind of crazy industry is this where even a website is eschewed as potentially sullying to a firm’s reputation?

myspace for lawyers?

What’s the big deal with social networking sites anyway? Maybe I’m too old, but I don’t really get it. Anyhow, it looks like there is a myspace type portal for lawyers at lawbby.com that lets you get out there (well not really, you stay home and post witty comments on each other’s pages) and network with your legal peers.

Diggity-Diggity – it’s Diigo

Diigo is the ’social bookmarking’ tool that I’m trying out as a method of keeping my bookmarks online. (and accessible wherever I am) . It’s a very easy tool to use (check here for a more detailed look at the tool). The aspect of it that intrigues me for the purposes of this post however, is the ability to create listings of links on the fly. This seems as though it would be an interesting way of generating links on a specific topic for an intranet collection in a law office or as a shared link repository for a research project with multiple group members. Here’s an example of the ‘linkroll’ (as it’s called) in action on my site:

WheneverI or any other user logged in to the correct account finds a site of interest, by adding it to the Diigo account, the link is automatically added to the list of links displaying on any page you’ve added the correct bit of html to.

What do you think?  Is this a handy tool, or have I let my love of toys tools get the better of me?

I’m Sorry.

I’m Sorry. I didn’t mean what I wrote, and anyways, I wasn’t referring to you when I wrote it.

I don’t know who you are or what it is you think I meant, but I can’t be too careful in light of the Louisiana court decision to award $11.3 million in damages against a woman for using an “internet forum to accuse another woman of being a con artist and a fraud.” The Sydney Morning Herald article covering this states that “A blog entry about a person will be considered defamatory if reasonable people would think less of the person because of the entry.” If this is the case, I think George Dubya has a real chance at being the richest person in America if he gets on this gravy train quick enough. (Of course, that’s assuming that what people are saying isn’t true)

Writely becomes Google Docs (& Spreadsheets)

Google’s purchase of Writely has just been incorporated into their newest feature, ‘Google Docs & Spreadsheets‘.  Google has migrated all of the documents that I previously had saved on Writely, and still contains all of the features of Writely plus ties it the Google Spreadsheets app, which was completely separate prior to this.  One of the great features of this app (from a poor law student who can’t afford Adobe Acrobate Pro perspective) is the ability to save your documents as pdfs. On the downside, you can’t yet embed spreadsheets in documents, but this is rumoured to be coming.  I haven’t played around with this too much yet, (yeah, yeah I have no friends) but the ability to collaborate with others strikes me as a great tool for group assignments and the like while in school.  The fact that the documents are stored on Google’s servers means that there may not be too much scope for using this once practicing, however.

***I’ve had to post this entry through the wordpress interface (how boring) as the Google Docs interface is giving me an error – I guess all the kinks aren’t worked out yet***

AustLII toolbar

Have you ever experienced difficulty conducting quality legal research online? Do you stay up at night trying to find relevent material for papers and assignments? What’s that you say? You don’t? You have access to both Lexis and Westlaw, plus a killer collection of online journals through your law library because of your status as a law student? Well this applies to you anyway. The kind folks at AustLII have come up with an AustLII toolbar that lets you search the AustLII databases and other material right from your browser window. Although I originally downloaded it from WorldLII, it unfortunately does not give toolbar access to WorldLII’s content, but nonetheless is a great tool for immediate access to all of AustLII’s content. Check it out here

Ubiquity, thy name is blog

It seems that the power to blog is becoming ubiquitous these days. As I mentioned in my last blog, blogging is possible from third party applications as well as directly through the blog host’s site. In that case it was Writely, in this case I’ve discovered that it is also possible to blog directly from OneNote (2007 Beta 2), the note taking tool developed by Microsoft.

 

To demonstrate, this blog is written in my ‘1032 – Computer Applications to Law’ notebook in OneNote. As you can see from the screenshot below, I’ve created a notebook (on the left edge of the image) for each of my classes. Within each notebook I then create a series of sections (tabs running along the top of the image) for different aspects of the class – in this case I’ve got Class Notes, Research and Blogs. Within each section, I then can create a new page or add to existing notes as the circumstances dictate. In this case, I’ve got a different page for each of the Blogs I’ve created (although this is the first published through OneNote.)

 

 

 

 

While I use the program at university, this program strikes me as an excellent organisational tool for legal practice as well. Setting each file up as a notebook allows easy access to each client’s file, and by creating your default folder on a server, you can also collaborate on files from any workstation running OneNote.

 

An hour of wasted effort later…

 

AARRGH!!

Guess what? MS Office 2007 (I’m using Beta 2) doesn’t support WordPress blogs hosted by WordPress. (but does support WP blogs hosted on your own domain) I’ve posted this the usual way. If you want to know more about the workings of OneNote (though I’m pissed off at MS right now I still love OneNote) check out my wiki on it.

If a tree falls..

If a blogger posts a blog and no one comments/reads it, is it still a blog? Start commenting ya freaks!!

This post is a demonstration of Writely’s blog tool, created in Writely, published to my WordPress blog through the Writely interface, and used as part of my ongoing exploration of internet and computer tools that can be used for legal study and/or practice. Check out the wiki entry here.

Google better not pull an Anakin…

The Register has reported that Google is planning to record background noise using your computer’s microphone, match this noise (say from tv or radio) to the correct program, and then serve up targeted ads relevant to the program you’re watching or listening to. Is it just me or is this the civil liberties equivalent of Iran developing a nuclear energy program? (gee, worst case scenario, is there anything that could go wrong?) the Register article is here

Law blogs as legal resource?

According to Bonnie Shucha over at Wisblawg, LexisNexis is now indexing blog content as part of their information aggregation service. A few comments on her blog reflect the seeming absurdity of paying LexisNexis to access what is otherwise free content, but the consensus seems to be that a large subset of data available through LexisNexis or similar companies is freely available already and what you’re paying for is not so much access to data as access to readily available, nicely sorted, indexed, and searchable data. I’ve got to agree with the latter viewpoint on this one, although I’m not positive that blogs have a place in what is otherwise a fairly reliable source of legal information. (seems the equivalent of citing wikipedia in a research paper)

Digital Evidence – a ‘LawTechTalk’ presentation by Stephen Mason

I got to school quite a bit early on Friday, and while waiting around for class to begin I noticed a poster advertising a LawTechTalk seminar on the use of digital evidence. As the seminar fit with my schedule I showed up for what turned out to be quite an interesting, if fairly cursory presentation. The speaker, Stephen Mason, is a “barrister and the Director of the Digital Evidence Research Programme at the British Institute of International and Comparative Law” according to the Cyberspace Law and Policy Centre’s webpage promoting the presentation, and has authored a number of books and articles focusing on various aspects of the digital domain as they pertain to the legal domain.

The presentation itself was an excellent introduction to the aspects of the digital world that the legal community must make itself aware of if we are to adapt to the realities of practising law in the 21st century, (To view the presentation’s Powerpoint slides, click here) although it was hampered to a degree by time constraints and the mistaken (and somewhat smug) assumption on the part of one of the audience (an IT specialist nonetheless) that Mr Mason was speaking of emails with an attachment when in fact he was not. (Mr Mason’s point was that in upholding a contract at least one court has held that the email addresses of the parties (and nothing more) constitute valid electronic signatures)

The other issue that Mr Mason’s presentation revealed was the new Law Building’s flawed handling of presentations. Not having recourse to a remote control with which to control his presentation, an audience member was co-opted into clicking through the presentation point by point from the control panel at the side of the room so Mr Mason could remain in front of the audience for his presentation.

This was the first of a series of presentations being put on by the Cyberspace Law and Policy Centre. If you’re interested in attending the next one keep an eye on the Cyberspace Law and Policy Centre’s website or if you’d like to be added to their mailing list of upcoming events send an email to feedback@cyberlawcentre.org.

Just created this blog…

…for my computer applications to law class.  Due to some schedule shuffling, I didn’t get registered until after the first class, so here’s hoping I get up to speed quick on what’s going on.