2007

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All in-force legislation now on OPSI

21 December 2007 in Legislation, Statute Law Database

As reported earlier, OPSI is working with SPO to bring the two online legislative services together, to create a single place where visitors can access the widest range of legislative content held by the government alongside supporting material. The first step in this process is to publish a most recent version of revised statutes from the Statute Law Database, using the same style and approach as OPSI has taken to publishing legislation as enacted.

John Sheridan, Head of e-Services at OPSI, now writes that this first step is complete. For an example see the Building Act 1984.

At present the statutes from the SLD on OPSI run up to 1987 and are published in a way consistent with OPSI’s approach to “as enacted” legislation, with a choice of user views.

OPSI are working increasingly closely with SPO as they develop an understanding of what users want and expect.

The Network in 2008

17 December 2007 in Blogging, Semantic web, Social networking, Web 2.0 | 4 comments

This year Web 2.0 came of age. Blogs, wikis, photo sharing, video sharing, social networking, social this, social that, SaaS: all these services have developed at phenomenal pace. In particular, the Facebook craze burst out of its collegiate limitations and has gained traction even amongst lawyers; at the SCL conference in June, half the delegates declared themselves Facebookers. We’ve seen a significant shift from the publisher-centric Web 1.0 to the user-centric Web 2.0 and this can only continue, but at what pace and how will it affect the law and lawyers in the coming year?

If 2007 was the year when social networking entered the consciousness of grown-ups (lawyers included), 2008 will be the year when its relevance beyond socialising or business networking is tested and found wanting. We want to do so much more than follow our “friends” or establish business contacts. Facebook, despite a stellar year of growth since opening up to all-comers, has not demonstrated that it is or can be much more than a much larger and more profitable version of what it was before; neither has LinkedIn, preferred by many as the platform for business networking.

The nub of it is that these social networks are walled gardens and the aspects of the social graph (the connections between people) that they exploit so effectively are just a small part of the larger social graph and an even smaller part of the “Giant Global Graph” (the connections between everything and everyone) towards which the web is evolving. The web is the real platform; everything else is just an application.

Think of the web of the future as one giant relational database, with data maintained by those who own it (that’s you and me in respect of our personal profiles and collections, organisations in respect of their products and services, etc); made available via open standards, with permissions determined by the owners; and aggregated and leveraged by those with expertise in particular technologies (the Googles and the Facebooks) or “verticals” (the publishers).

Facebook et al may command the headlines and be sitting on mountains of data about us, commanding silly valuations; they will continue to prosper, but there is room on the web for anyone with particular expertise and as to what Web 2.0 can do for lawyers, we should be looking elsewhere.

In 2008 we’ll see the incumbent law publishers experimenting with Web 2.0, attempting to engage users on their own platforms. We already have LexisNexis’s Company Law Forum, and PLC talk of doing similar, but in a more controlled environment. We’ll also see more Web 2.0 initiatives from “independents” such as CaseCheck and the prospective grand IP Law Wiki. Given the small size of the UK legal community and its inherent conservatism, it’s unlikely that any of these services will gain substantial followings within the year, but they are the ones to watch.

And let’s not forget the blogosphere. Because it is now old hat, blogging may be thought “so yesterday”. But consider that you find more useful work-related conversations on a single law blog than you do on the whole of Facebook and that lawyers, their colleagues and associates and their potential clients network on blogs every day. Blogging is the most successful and relevant Web 2.0 network and that’s not going to change anytime soon.

Keeping company

17 December 2007 in Law publishing, Law sites | 1 comment

Company Law Forum from LexisNexis is the first attempt at a substantial Web 2.0 site from a mainstream law publisher. It is intended to provide an environment for the legal and business community to share insights and discuss company law-related issues.

It is free to access; registration entitles you to create a profile, publish opinions, ask questions in the forum, answer forum questions, comment on opinions, comment on and rate news, and message other users.

There are substantive articles on company law topics together with frequent news items and opinions.

There will also be news and current awareness headline feeds shortly.

Given the detail of its functionality, it looks like this is LexisNexis’ pilot for a range of similar services.

Who goes to the top? – you decide

30 November 2007 in Blogging, Law publishing | 4 comments

The ABA Journal Blawg 100 are “the 100 best Web sites by lawyers, for lawyers, as chosen by the editors of the ABA Journal.”

Kevin O’Keefe reacts to this with a star post Law Blog vanity contests : ABA adds to the silliness:

to get sucked into believing a contest like the ABA Journal’s 100 best lawyer blogs means something is the height of folly.

I’m not as worked up as Kevin, but I completely agree that this sort of award does miss the point. As Kevin says:

Law blogs represent disintermediation of publishers and gatekeepers. No more are those in supposed power and control going to screen and serve up what they think is important. A lawyer in a town with a water tower, an old grain elevator and 3 four way stops is on equal footing with a lawyer who clerked for a Supreme Court Judge. The democratization of publishing and dialogue we get through law blogs is at the very heart of what we stand for in America.

In a comment to the post, ABA-listed blawger Dennis Kennedy agrees that this “might be the best paragraph you’ve ever written and it perfectly encapsulates what I also think is the core of law blogging.”

Blogging, and Web 2.0 in general, is not about publisher A or B selecting and promoting what is best; it is about all the Xs and Ys contributing to the conversation in their field of interest and the Zs voting with their mice. The best will rise to the top and we don’t need anyone to select the short-list.

An optimal copyright term

30 November 2007 in Copyright, Free culture | 1 comment

Victor Keegan in How long should copyright last? covers the arguments for a shorter copyright term in the digital age.

To exemplfy the absurdity of a strict application of copyrights, he points to Nate Andersen who reports that John Tehranian, a law professor at the University of Utah, totted up all the infringements he might have made in a typical day, estimating it could have cost him more than $12m (£5.8m) in “fines”.

Andersen believes that the US Copyright Act of 1976, which granted copyrights automatically (rather than on registration), “hand[ed] out rights so broad that most Americans simply find them absurd”.

In the UK, copyrights have, since inception, been automatic, and I don’t see a problem with that per se. The problem arises because copyright terms have periodically been extended from the original 14 years and there is pressure from the media industry incumbents to further extend them in an era when they should in fact be reduced for optimal effect.

Rufus Pollock, a research fellow in economics at Emmanuel College, Cambridge and a director of the Open Knowledge Foundation, demonstrates this in his paper Forever Minus a Day? Some Theory and Empirics of Optimal Copyright. “Optimal copyright” falls as the costs of production go down (for example as a result of digitisation) and, in general, over time. Using a simple model he characterises the “optimal term” as a function of a few key parameters, and using a combination of new and existing data on recordings and books, finds it to be around 15 years. In other words, at about 15 years the benefits that derived from the creator’s initial monopoly are outweighed by the benefits that would arise by setting their work free.

Susskind 2.0 digested (6)

28 November 2007 in Future of law | 2 comments

In the last Times extract from The End of Lawyers? Richard Susskind answers his critics. There are those that argue that “computers cannot replace legal work. Full stop.” and others who believe that IT will have no or minimal effect on lawyers. To which the reply is:

Open-minded lawyers, and those who genuinely care about the interests of their clients should, in the internet age, continually be looking at ways in which IT can play a more prominent role in their services. … there is remarkable scope for greater and beneficial deployment of technology. I also contend that for some lawyers there are existing and emerging technologies whose widespread adoption will effectively render them redundant. …“disruptive legal technologies” … do not support or complement current legal practices. They challenge and replace them, in whole or in part.

Most of the disruptive technologies that I identify … are phenomena of which most practising lawyers are only dimly aware. … If lawyers are barely conversant with today’s technologies, they have even less sense of how much progress in legal technology is likely in the coming 10 years. Politely, it puzzles me profoundly that lawyers who know little about current and future technologies can be so confident about their inapplicability.

The end.

More on the future of law.

Defining the semantic web

28 November 2007 in Semantic web, Social networking

In 1999 Tim Berners-Lee had a dream for what he called the “semantic web“, in which computers

become capable of analyzing all the data on the Web – the content, links, and transactions between people and computers. A ‘Semantic Web’, which should make this possible, has yet to emerge, but when it does, the day-to-day mechanisms of trade, bureaucracy and our daily lives will be handled by machines talking to machines. The ‘intelligent agents’ people have touted for ages will finally materialize.

In his only blog post in the last a year, he sees the semantic web already emerging. First we had the internet which demonstrated that “it isn’t the cables, it is the computers which are interesting”. Then came the web which demonstrated that “it isn’t the computers, but the documents which are interesting”. Now there is realisation that “it’s not the documents, it is the things they are about which are important … Obvious, really.”

Biologists are interested in proteins, drugs, genes. Businesspeople are interested in customers, products, sales. We are all interested in friends, family, colleagues, and acquaintances. There is a lot of blogging about the strain, and total frustration that, while you have a set of friends, the Web is providing you with separate documents about your friends. One in facebook, one on linkedin, one in livejournal, one on advogato, and so on. The frustration that, when you join a photo site or a movie site or a travel site, you name it, you have to tell it who your friends are all over again. The separate Web sites, separate documents, are in fact about the same thing — but the system doesn’t know it.

There are cries from the heart (e.g The Open Social Web Bill of Rights) for my friendship, that relationship to another person, to transcend documents and sites. There is a “Social Network Portability” community. Its not the Social Network Sites that are interesting — it is the Social Network itself. The Social Graph. The way I am connected, not the way my Web pages are connected.

We can use the word Graph, now, to distinguish from Web. I called this graph the Semantic Web, but maybe it should have been Giant Global Graph.

Although he emphasises the social graph and most commentators have picked up on this alone, clearly there is much more to the (tongue-in-cheek) GGG than this. The semantic graph contains more types of nodes and links, but more importantly, unlike the graphs in the closed social networks, its meaning is defined and exposed in an open and machine-understandable fashion (per Nova Spivack).

Many more excerpts from and links to the conversation about this are in a post entitled Who is afraid of the GGG? on Nodalities.

2008 – the year of the wiki?

20 November 2007 in Law publishing

Mark Chillingworth, writing in Information World Review, posts a summary of the Information Industry Outlook 2008 report from analyst Outsell.

STM and legal information providers will achieve growth of $20.9bn between 2007 and 2010 … before experiencing a gradual slowdown. Growth in the sector will be driven not so much by the information, as its integration into workflow, “granting the flexibility to bypass shrinking library budgets,”… The STM market is dominated by Elsevier, followed by Thomson Scientific, Wolters Kluwer and Springer.

Outsell described the news and publishing industry as being “in the most uncomfortable place in its history” due to the high cost of traditional printed newspapers and magazines and slow conversion to online. … 2008 would be “the year of the wiki”, with Web 2.0 technology replacing complex portals and knowledge management, and that a “critical mass of information professionals would take charge of wikis, blogs or other 2.0 technologies on behalf of their organisations”.

The report is a snip at $895.

Susskind 2.0 digested (5)

20 November 2007 in Future of law, Law publishing

From the fifth Times extract from The End of Lawyers?

No-one who might be thought to be in the driving seat of the legal system [not law schools, nor legal academics, nor the professional bodies, nor the UK Government, nor the Law Commission] is thinking systematically, rigorously and in a sustained way about the long term future of legal service. No-one seems to be worrying about the fate of the next generation of lawyers.

All that can be discerned in relation to the long term is a common assumption – whether on the part of scholars, professional bodies, government agencies or leading law firms – that legal service of tomorrow will be quite similar to that of today; perhaps more efficient and more business-like but not fundamentally different in nature.

It is assumed that legal guidance will continue to be dispensed by skilled professionals as a one-to-one, consultative advisory service. By and large, no discontinuities, transformations, upheavals, disruptions or revolutions in the nature of legal service are being contemplated.

One possible exception here is the legal publishing community, a market that has changed markedly in the last decade, in its widespread adoption of online techniques. I have found that many legal publishers, from the large and multi-jurisdictional to the small and entrepreneurial, do have a long term view, although it is not one they tend to publicise, for fear, perhaps, of swallowing the hand that feeds them.

Why is it that law publishers have a long term view of the shape of legal service and what is this view that they are reluctant to express? They do not need long-term lenses to see “discontinuities, transformations, upheavals, disruptions or revolutions” in (law) publishing: they are happening now. And whilst Web 1.0 facilitated the delivery of information and transactions between producers (publishers) and consumers (lawyers) and set the ball rolling, Web 2.0 is transforming the medium into one that challenges the traditional roles. Publishers see the writing on the wall: the production and dissemination of legal information is no longer the preserve of (traditional) law publishers. But, as Susskind argues, lawyers should also see the writing on the wall: the acquisition, processing and application of legal knowledge and procedures is no longer the preserve of (traditional) lawyers.

So how’s this for a vision? A generation hence, all the developed world’s legal information will be digitally organised and much of it will be free; all lawyers will be contributors and participants, if not publishers; all publishers (as we now know them) will be web service providers, primarily facilitating access to information rather than generating content; and all participants – clients, lawyers, publishers and other service providers – will be connected and authenticated via the “social graph”. More detail of my vision will be in a forthcoming book The End of Law Publishers? to be published soon!

All Susskind 2.0 extracts digested.

Taking stock of docstoc

16 November 2007 in Forms and precedents | 3 comments

I’ve spent some time browsing around on docstoc, a sort of YouTube for “professional” documents which has just launched in public beta. (Hat tip: Bob Ambrogi)

docstoc is a user generated community for sharing professional documents. Find a vast quantity of high quality legal, business, technology, educational, and creative documents for free. docstoc allows users to upload their documents for all the world to share. In addition, users can store their documents in their own personal online folders for anytime, anywhere access.

It certainly is a very natty service, with all the Web 2.0 features you might wish for and more. But who is it aimed at and how useful will it be?

A service such as YouTube can legitimately and successfully accept uploads from all-comers, target the whole world and rely on user tagging and rating effectively to facilitate access and promote the best. But with many professional documents – legal in particular – we need to know such crucial things as the applicable jurisdiction and the particular circumstances for which each document is drafted. That makes docstoc as it stands of very limited use to the lawyer and somewhat dangerous for the lay user.

The only reasonably detailed critique of docstocs by a lawyer I have so far found is from contract drafstman and regular blogger Ken Adams:

the rating feature seems beside the point, given the countless factors that would determine whether a given contract model is suitable for a given transaction. And the comment feature is far too coarse to be of any real use–the best you could hope for is comments such as “This is a pro-seller form.” …

The situation would have to be grim indeed for you to be rooting around for a [precedent] on docstoc.

At this point, docstoc appear to be much keener on quantity than quality, despite their assertion in the quote above that the documents are “high quality” (how would they know?)

To celebrate the launch, docstoc are giving away an iPod Touch to the user who uploads the most documents each week during November. Way out front in this contest is one Farhan Khan with 22,246 uploads, most of which he inaccurately categorises as legal forms. He seems to have uploaded the entire US Department for Homeland Security and Postal Service stock of forms – and more of similar ilk I’m sure – as well as Hindi jokes and a document which “tells you some interesting stuff about cancer and how to survive a heart attach when you are alone!” (his exclamation mark, not mine).

Despite the somewhat fundamental reservations, I can see that by applying some discipline to ones tagging one could, within docstoc global, create a very usable store of precedents with sufficient authority and categorisation to satisfy even the discerning lawyer. Sure it would be nice to have a dedicated, professionally-moderated, UK legal docstoc, but this wheel has been invented and is here, now, so I’ll give it a whirl soon, uploading some UK legal stuff you can rely on, and get back to you with an update.

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