Rory Perry: Legal Information Standards

Docket-level RSS from Ohio Supreme Court

Tue, 05 Dec 2006 20:27:49 GMT

We called for this development three years ago, and now at least one court is getting it done. The Ohio Supreme Court has a "Case Activity Notification Service" that allows users to set up a free account and receive e-mail or RSS updates about docket activities in selected cases. Nice work Ohio!

Five State Appellate Courts Using RSS

Thu, 10 Nov 2005 19:34:53 GMT

There are now a total of five state appellate courts utilizing RSS feeds to share information about opinions and news. In April 2002, West Virginia became the first, and Oklahoma is the most recent, and most prodigious, with a total of five feeds. Here's the breakdown so far:

West Virginia Supreme Court
Recent Opinions
Civil Topics
Criminal Topics
Family Topics

Louisiana Supreme Court
News Releases

North Dakota Supreme Court
Recent News
Recent Opinions

Oklahoma Courts
Recent Decisions
Supreme Court Opinions
Court of Civil Appeals
Court of Criminal Appeals
Attorney General Opinions

Utah Appellate Courts
Recent Opinions

New proposed standard for legal documents on the Web

Thu, 03 Mar 2005 00:57:51 GMT

LegalXHTML.org is a promising new kid on the block in the world of proposed standards for structured legal documents on the web. The technical specification [pdf], relies on the W3C's XHTML 2.0, and Dublin Core elements that conform to the Resource Description Framework. From the site:

Legal XHTML weaves these three building blocks - XHTML2, RDF, and Dublin Core - into a straightforward grammar which preserves for legal instruments the same flexibility familiar to authors and technical staff who today publish non-legal HTML documents on the Web. The result is that Legal XHTML encourages the development of sophisticated business practices regarding the content, exchange, and use of legal instruments by its parties and other interested individuals.

New e-filing blog

Wed, 16 Feb 2005 16:47:42 GMT

Electronic Filing & Service for Courts is a new blog that tracks development and implementation of electronic filing projects nationwide. David Darst of LexisNexis File & Serve is the blog's author, and he does a good job of collecting news items from around the country related to electronic filing projects.

Public Domain case citations

Wed, 04 Aug 2004 15:51:09 GMT

David Starkoff discusses medium neutral citations in Australian courts, including the recognition that wide dissemination "requires cooperation from those who see the diminution (or elimination) of revenue streams . . . ."

More information at the Australasion Legal Information Institute (AustLII), Guide to Vendor and Medium Neutral Citations. Thanks to Denise Howell for the link.

New resources from National Center for State Courts

Tue, 03 Aug 2004 16:12:05 GMT

Working on implementing: State Court Guide to Statistical Reporting 2003, which, once implemented nationawide, should allow better understanding of the appellate process for several defined case types and events not currently well-understood.

Thinking about attending: eCourts Conference 2004

Newly added to National Center for State Courts Web site: "Blakely v. Washington: Implications for State Courts" [pdf], Links to State Information on Mass Torts [pdf]; a resource page for helping state courts address the funding crisis.

Tracking: JXDD: Justice XML Data Dictionary [pdf]

For future reference

Thu, 25 Mar 2004 19:47:06 GMT

A comprehensive list of Great RSS Tools, via [RSS Resources Blog]

Legal Information Systems News

Wed, 03 Dec 2003 21:47:14 GMT

The 16th Annual International Conference on Legal Information Systems, or JURIX 2003, will be held December 11-12 in Utrecht, the Netherlands. In conjunction, a call for participation has been issued by the Liebniz Center for Law for a one-day "International Workshop on the Development of Standards for Describing Legal Documents". The conference will profile Italian, Swiss and Dutch efforts in this area. There are several international legal standardization bodies at work on XML markup standards for legal information, including MetaLex (which has produced version 1.0 of a language independent markup standard) and LexML.

Continuing to grapple with the electronic release of confidential information in court files, courts in Florida and New Hampshire have recently taken action on the recommendation of study committees in this area. [I'm obliged to beSpacific for the link.] One of the issues faced by courts that release bulk data to the information industry is the downstream effect of erroneous information in the bulk set, as well as subsequent changes to the data. For example, how are expungements and pardons handled? What about erroneous entries? What damages flow from erroneous or private data released to an outside source? One aspect of the issue -- whether damages are available under the Privacy Act for governmental release of private information where no actual damages are proven -- will be considered at oral argument tomorrow before the US Supreme Court in the case of Doe v. Chao [Docket | Briefs]. Wired News has this report.

CTC8 Continues

Wed, 29 Oct 2003 21:41:46 GMT

Another long day exploring court technology at CTC8 in Kansas City. I've now spoken twice about syndication and official court weblogs as a tool for improving public access. Also timely is a front-page article in the Court Technology Bulletin (no link yet) I authored entitled "Publishing an Official Court Weblog." The concept is new, and may be slow to take hold in the courts. However, I did learn yesterday that the Supreme Court of Utah will soon join West Virginia in providing access to its opinions via RSS. Hot topics include:

Automated performance measurement
Public access to court records -- developing policies and rules
Business process enhancement during technology implementations
Finding better ways to manage the IT budget

Federal Computer Week ran a story today about Chief Justice Toal's presentation, which is entitled "Courts must invest in IT, judge says". There's more to come tonight and tomorrow, and I'll be gathering more links as the conference moves forward for posting next week when I return to Charleston.

Review of state judicial homepages

Wed, 29 Oct 2003 15:27:20 GMT

The Judiciary.org has published a visual review of all 50 state judicial homepages. The following assessment criteria were applied:

Is the Home Page designed to make full use of the visitor's monitor, regardless of resolution settings?
If the Home Page does not make full use of monitor resolution, is content centered to enhance appearance and ease of viewing?
Does the Home Page tarnish the high professional and ethical standards associated with the judicial function by advertising or promoting private sector products and services?
Is the Home Page visually appealing?
Does the Home Page enhance a visitor's inclination to further explore the site?
Is the Home Page designed to be accessible and navigable by the vast majority of those who might use it?
Are color combinations used that allow the site to be accessible to those who suffer from varying degrees of color blindness?

International court technology news

Wed, 22 Oct 2003 21:43:12 GMT

The news reports over the past week show that court technology is on the move internationally. Chief Justice BN Kirpal announced recently that the Supreme Court of India will enable e-filing in the coming months. India has an interesting government portal, with a wide variety of citizen services, including Cause Lists for Indian Courts, and the ability to lodge public grievances online. In Nigeria, the President of the Nigerian Bar Association, along with the Chief Judge of Lagos State, recently emphasized the importance of pursuing electronic filing and other legal technology endeavors. In Australia, court officials recently announced an attempt to implement electronic filing and other measures to clear a backlog of criminal appeals. Finally, I heard from a collegue recently who is the Clerk of the Supreme Court of Guam, which has implemented an open source electronic filing system from Counterclaim.

Meanwhile, back in the states, Associated Press recently ran a good article outlining an issue I've written about before: whether court technology projects such as electronic filing leave the poor behind.

Weblog and RSS Resources for Courts -- offering for BloggerCon

Fri, 03 Oct 2003 16:37:44 GMT

I'm working on a resource page to encourage courts to use weblogs and syndication technology to publish more court information on the Web. The early draft is available here, and I welcome comments, ideas and links, especially from those folks at Day 2 of BloggerCon 2003 attending theWeblogs and the Law session.

8th National Court Technology Conference

Tue, 22 Jul 2003 22:17:52 GMT

I'm looking forward to speaking later this year at the Eighth National Court Technology Conference, or CTC8, on the topic of Building Better Public Access, (without breaking the budget). I'll be focusing on the use of weblogs to deliver public information about the courts, with a special emphasis on RSS and aggregators. I'll be airing some of the details of my presentation on this weblog between now and October, and I'll blog from the conference as well. Even if you don't plan to attend, you can enter your court's Web site in the Top Ten Court Web Site Competition. Before you do, check out the winners from CTC7.

Some details about CTC8. The conference will be held October 28-30 in Kansas City, Missouri, and will offer a variety of interesting educational sessions, including tracks for administrators, court officials and technologists. The showcase theatres and courtroom setups promise to feature all the latest wizardry. The exhibition hall will house plenty of vendors. As usual, meetings of various special interest groups will be meeting on topics such as XML, IT Auditing, Electronic Filing, Automated Court Performance Management, and many others. I also spoke at CTC7, and returned to the Court energized and having learned a great deal from my national and international colleagues. Perhaps this is the year blogging (at least of the official sort) will take hold in the courts.

Welcome back John Robb

Tue, 22 Jul 2003 15:22:56 GMT

John Robb's Weblog is back online at a new location, and the need to change nearly 30,000 inbound links. It's no wonder he adds this lesson learned: "NEVER (under any circumstances) publish a weblog to a domain that you don't control." I've dutifully changed the links in the right-hand navigation, but what about all the old links to John Robb content? Is there some way to search and replace within Radio to change links in old posts?

Two cents on the RSS debate

Mon, 30 Jun 2003 22:58:30 GMT

Count me among the weblog end users who are simply trying to use RSS now to expand the delivery of information. I work in the public sector, and have been publishing court information as RSS for over a year, with some real benefits to the public and the court where I work. Now, our expansion plans to develop additional automated RSS feeds from our case management system will apparently have to be put on hold.

My attempts to gain further understanding by reviewing this discussion and others has been frustrating, to say the least. What I have seen is an amazing lack of decorum, lack of clarity in discussion, and willingness to put suspicion first, along with some talk about the technical side, where the issues don't appear to be insurmountable at all. Why should I care? Because what's important for my work is to have a stable, scalable standard in this area that can still be implemented by ordinary folks like myself who want to expand information delivery and keep the budget low.

Request for Information on Search Appliances

Tue, 27 May 2003 21:54:03 GMT

Courts are another iteration of knowledge-based enterprises, with lots of overlapping procedural and consitutional guidelines. One of the first questions appellate courts in particular confront is: what have we done before? With the development of online research tools, that question has become easier to resolve in recent years by doing a search of court opinions or legislative material. But that only tells you the final outcome in decided cases. What if you want to search administrative orders, or memos to circuit clerks, or calendar and docket entries, or minutes of public meetings, or phone logs of answers given to pro se callers, etc? To function smoothly, courts must consult these materials constantly, a process that can become increasingly dependent on institutional memory as systems become more and more complex.

Building a taxonomy would certainly be beneficial, but I question the need for the effort in light of recent technology developments that enable brute-force ability to search text and return relevant results. Enter the Google search appliance, used by entities like Stanford University and the The City of San Diego. The Google approach appears to be a good fit for our needs, but I'd like more information.

I therefore submit the following REQUEST FOR INFORMATION from other users (or potential users) of this appliance (or its competitors) regarding: effectiveness, especially with sets of previously unconverted and unhyperlinked text documents; implementation considerations; ease of use and access to support; and whether you would buy it again if you had the chance. Leave comments on this post or e-mail me by clicking the spam-free mail link on the right-hand sidebar.

LISA Network created to provide legal reviews of information standards

Fri, 16 May 2003 22:03:44 GMT

David Fletcher consistently does a great job of reporting the progress of many different e-government information initiatives, both in Utah and elsewhere, including this interesting post about the need for governmental efforts to build "trust" in the digital environment.

In that spirit, I'd like to pass along a link I stumbled upon this week to a new initiative founded by some of the European LEXML folks (i.e., 1, 2), called the LISA Network, whose stated goal is to "enhance legally founded trust in the use of information standards" by contributing legal reviews of information standards, and participating in ongoing debates and design activites. There's a new blog, with an RSS feed. Certainly worth following.

Talkative lawyers create a nourishing thicket, or, Law is Free

Fri, 07 Mar 2003 20:24:20 GMT

One year ago today, I posted Law is Free, as an attempt to explain some of the underlying reasons for using broad publish/subscribe technology to put more legal information out there for free.

In the year since I wrote this story, I've grown more comfortable with the technology, and have added several new pages to the WV Supreme Court's offering of online information, each with its own RSS feed:
Recent Opinions
Civil Topics
Criminal Topics
Family Topics.
On the larger scale, we've seen wonderful growth in the quality, scope and timeliness of free legal content on the Web. During the past year, blawgs by law professors, legal scholars, journalists, appellate practitioners, law librarians, legal pundits, paralegals, law firms, international lawyers, trademark lawyers, law students, and law clerks have come online. (To read them all, check out Denise Howell's blawgroll--she coined the term "blawg", after all, and Ernie's Law Blawgs Outline.) Lawyers who can write code, or poetry, or design pages, or tell good stories, are all fastening quickly to the growing rubric of customized, smart and lively knowledge exchange. Outlanders no longer, blawgers have even been recognized by the American Bar Association.

Given all this, I have little doubt that more lawyers and legal professionals will continue the trend toward participation. And being a loquacious bunch, it's likely that our talking will have a beneficial side product: a deeper and more freely available body of knowledge about the law and its effects on our lives. That, I insist, is a good thing.

Virginia court records headed online

Mon, 03 Mar 2003 01:24:09 GMT

The 2003 General Assembly of the State of Virginia has passed a bill [HB 2426] intended to regulate remote access to public land and court records through the Internet. Among the interesting details: court and county clerks can refuse to record an instrument containing a social security number; documents containing sensitive information cannot be posted; court clerks will be required to offer free subscription access; the subscription appllication process must include a sworn statement of the identity, home or business address, nationality, and purpose in applying for access.

More on digital archive standards

Mon, 03 Mar 2003 01:07:24 GMT

This article by Michael Looney in the March Edition Syllabus Magazine highlights the need for digital archive standards in higher education. I've written before about joint efforts underway to develop a common digital archive standard, called PDF-A. Mr. Looney, who is a senior director at Adobe Systems, Inc., explains the effort as follows:

PDF/A proponents (a working group comprised of industry, government, and academic institutions working with AIIM and NPES) are aiming to have PDF/A officially recognized by the International Standards Organization (of ISO 9000 fame) within approximately 18 months. Their efforts are directed at solving a serious and increasingly urgent problem. The lack of a recognized and accepted electronic standard for records preservation?particularly as new generations of hardware and software have made previous digital technology obsolete?has led to the loss of significant amounts of valuable information over the past several decades. Military files from the Vietnam War, records from the Viking Mars Mission, Census Bureau data and land use records have been lost due to the inability to read data formats and the deterioration of magnetic tapes used to store that data.

The list of organizations that mandate or use PDF as a de facto standard is growing to include the U.S. Courts, the National Science Foundation for grant submission, and the Food and Drug Administration for drug submissions. A common PDF/A standard will give librarians and educators the confidence that their records could be readily accessed far into the future.

Court technology news at law.com

Fri, 14 Feb 2003 20:36:26 GMT

There are a couple of articles recently posted at Law.com regarding court technology issues that are worth reading. The first, Court Documents: Will They Age Well?by David Harrigan, covers the difficulties of assuring the long-term viability of electronic court documents, including a joint effort to develop a robust archiving standard, called PDF-A, for presentation to the ISO and other standards bodies. Harrigan also covers XML, and intimates that the data exchange format will be used in association with PDF-A. Harrigan notes that none of the state (or federal) courts are currently pursuing the adoption of the PDF-A standard.

The second article, Get Ready for E-Filing, by Pat O'Donnell for the Legal Times, covers the new SEC electronic filing required by the Sarbanes-Oxley Act. [pdf] Given a newly-shortened 2 day deadline for certain disclosures, the Act mandates use of technology to insure timely filing. Further law.com reading on the impact of this Act on document retention policies here.

SOAP for courts

Wed, 05 Feb 2003 18:31:55 GMT

How could I have missed this? As a follow-up to prior thoughts on implementing e-filing in the courts, I hear great news from Jim McMillan: the Court Technology Laboratory of the National Center for State Courts has developed inCounter, an "Open Source Electronic Filing Demonstration Project." From the site:

Specifically, the inCounter Electronic Filing Manager project is an effort to build the core functionality of an electronic filing inbox that has the following initial goals:
Demonstrate electronic court document filing.
Demonstrate a simple to use system (limited initial scope).
Create an expandable and customizable system through use of open source code.
Demonstrate support for CourtXML/OASIS LegalXML filing standards.
Demonstrate support of the W3C SOAP XML communications standard (to connect commercial and advanced systems).
Demonstrate the use of free Linux, Apache, Perl, and MySQL software in a court application.

The middleware uses SOAP, has a whitepaper [pdf], downloadable source code, documentation, and an interesting FAQ page. Excerpt: "we believe that SOAP is a very important technology direction and hope to work with advanced systems to prove the concept for court electronic filing systems ." There's an explanation of SOAP in the court filing context, as well as a SOAP demo. The project was funded by a grant from the State Justice Institute

My favorite part? It's all free, and ready for tinkering right now. More to come on this later.

What law-related material can we put in RSS feeds

Mon, 03 Feb 2003 20:43:02 GMT

In response to this call for ideas on rss legal feeds, and a prompt from Ernie, here's a few unrefined suggestions, in no particular order:

Appellate Court Dockets and Opinions: to allow tracking of new filings; filings in particular cases; and issuance of new opinions. These should be primary source feeds (i.e. produced by the courts themselves either as part of the outgoing stream of data from case management systems or from weblog publishing systems). Deployment could start with the highest courts of last resort (US Supreme Court, Federal Appeals Courts, State COLR). An alternate approach may be to enable rss feeds for highly-watched cases. Most appellate courts are familiar with the benefits of enabling better information flow for cases of great public interest.
Trackback/Comments for Appellate Court Opinions

Eldred v. Ashcroft

Court rule changes: notification and current awareness of recent and upcoming changes to court rules. Primary source feeds. Deployment could start with the highest courts of last resort.
Topical court feeds: this is more tricky, because it would likely depend on secondary sources (i.e., webloggers, academics, law reviews, etc.) developing a reliable "voice" in a particular area. Not quite government RSS, but the secondary sources would rely on the primary public information feeds. Some courts could take my approach, (WV Supreme Court), and deploy straightforward topical feeds like: civil, criminal, family, etc.
Legislation: Newly introduced bills feed, together with feeds per bill/resolution number, containing legislative event items and links to full text. This could be deployed in state and federal legislative bodies. (Even if the government didn't do this, I could see a great use for this service being produced by lobbying and political organizations who have highly focused and time sensitive topics to cover. A great example of this approach is the Consensus at Lawyerpoint weblog, "Being a true account of the undertakings of the Broadcast Protection Discussion Group" and its associated rss feed.) Alternatively, (or additionally), feeds could be organized to contain the event items of a particular committee or subcommittee (Senate Judiciary hearing schedule - witnesses to appear, etc). With links to Congressional Record text of testimony?
Regulatory activities: Newly introduced regs, and a separate feed with event item tracking per regulatory series, and links to appropriate full text at each event item. Basically an RSSified Federal Register
Executive Orders and AppointmentsText of new executive orders, when issued. Separate items for executive appointments, as introduced.
Election Returns: Why not? And while we're at it, throw in new filings for office.
and the rest . . .Professional licensing history, per license number; administrative claims dockets; economic and employment data; census data; weather and space data; emergency warnings and threat awareness.

I predict that a year from now a lot more government information will be available in rss feeds. After all, it's just another type of data returned from a Web server.

By the way, Ernie has a very thought-provoking post today about reputation systems in the legal profession.

Another reason for more courts to create RSS feeds

Fri, 31 Jan 2003 21:56:14 GMT

News Aggregators Become Mainstream J.D. Lasica, blogger and senior editor for the Online Journalism Review, details the advantages of the increasingly popular free and fee-based news aggregator applications in News That Comes to You. These programs allow researchers who are suffering from information overload to scan headlines chosen from among thousands of news feeds that use RSS (Rich Site Summary) tags. [beSpacific]

I bet I'm not the only one who would like to have folders in my aggregator for all the courts I'm watching for orders and opinions, and read those feeds just like I read all the others. I really need to write some evangelistic tutorials. Barry Bayer, of the Law Office Technology Review, called me today to confirm that the court I work for is the only one producing RSS feeds for opinions and such. So far as I know, we're still the one.

Lawyers: Protect Your Data

Fri, 31 Jan 2003 21:43:22 GMT

(30 Jan) The article outlines procedures and policies that help law firms protect client data and reduce their risk of exposure. [TVC Alert]