Google Law – the beginnings

It was only a matter of time before Google turned its attention to the law. So we now have Legal Opinions on Google Scholar and everybody is all aTwitter about it.

Legal Opinions on Google Scholar opens up access to full text legal opinions from US federal and state district, appellate and supreme courts and via a Cited By feature links to other cases and articles on Scholar that cite them. (Though court opinions in the US are not protected by copyright they wre hitherto only readily available for comprehensive searching via services such as Lexis and Westlaw.)

For a good primer on its features, see Don Cruse on the Supreme Court of Texas Blog (hat tip Jason Wilson).

You can also use Google Scholar / Legal Opinions to follow up citations of judgments that are not themselves indexed in full text, including those from other jurisdictions. For example, one will readily find citations of leading cases such as Hedley Byrne and Donoghue v Stevenson, and more recent cases of course.

So it’s going to be useful for (US) legal research, though it will be some time before it challenges the likes of Wexis. Calm … down, says Jason Wilson.

The development is hyped by Anurag Acharya, the Distinguished Engineer (sic) behind the development, on the Official Google Blog, saying:

We think this addition to Google Scholar will empower the average citizen by helping everyone learn more about the laws that govern us all. … we were struck by how readable and accessible these opinions are. Court opinions don’t just describe a decision but also present the reasons that support the decision. In doing so, they explain the intricacies of law in the context of real-life situations.

I don’t buy this empowerment argument. It’s absolutely right that citizens should have access to the laws that bind them and any initiative that makes them more accessible is to be welcomed. But to empower the average citizen you have to go the extra mile, explaining the law. Lawyers and legal researchers have spent years learning the law and acquiring the skills that enable them to navigate and reliably interpret primary law and precedent.

Free legal information – the Berring strait

Bob Berring is an eminent Professor of Law at the University of California Berkeley who has won significant recognition for teaching and law librarianship.

In his time he’s consulted for West. How closely associated he is I do not know; he plays West up substantially in this YouTube clip. (See also this post and the comments thereto on Thomson Reuters blog Legal Current.)

Bob kicks off his vid by saying “I do believe in the market system”. So, he’s not a commie. But what does he mean by “the market system” – it soon becomes clear.

He believes that government efforts in the provision of free legal information have failed because there are no incentives; and that “volunteer efforts”, worthy as they may be, are unlikely to be sustained. He rightly says that legal information is not easily packaged: we need a map and a compass to navigate it; it needs to be organised and value added. I think we all agree with that. But his conclusion appears to be that only Wexis have sufficient incentive and only they can mobilise the necessary army to add sufficient value for it to be useful. That’s clearly preposterous – the talk of someone living in the past.

For Bob the free legal information that’s out there is “a bunch of goo” and the only thing that can sort out the mess is “the market system”. Well I have to tell Bob that it’s more nuanced than that. Sure, people need incentives, but those incentives are not only to turn a profit for shareholders. We live in a mixed economy Bob and we live by differing values:

• government has an incentive to make legal information more accessible
• the legal profession has an incentive to make legal information more accessible
• various non-profits have an incentive to make legal information more accessible
• citizens have an incentive to make legal information more accessible
• and there are many private enterprises short of Wexis who have an incentive to make legal information more accessible

All these are players in the development of better legal information; all these are making a difference.

More commentary on Slaw.

Digital Engagement Report

Gov 2.0 is now officially “Digital Engagement”. Guided by Minister Tom Watson, the Digital Engagement team at the Cabinet Office is now headed by Director Andrew Stott who is charged with taking forward the Power of Information agenda.

The Digital Engament team will “work across Government departments to encourage, support and challenge them in moving from communicating to citizens on the web to conversing and collaborating with them through digital technology.”

Its debut is the Government response to the Power of Information Task Force Report – available via the new Digital Engagement blog. The POI principles are substantailly accepted by government: they are “no longer just recommendations in a report but will be core to the future development and implementation of government policy.”

Legal informatics – a big world

Tom Bruce, co-founder and director of the Legal Information Institute at Cornell Law School posts an interesting piece on the big new world of legal informatics, concluding:

We need to make informed choices between inexpensive automated approaches that work by brute force and the hand-crafted, highly-accurate approaches of legal bibliography that are not always scalable or affordable. We need to recalibrate what we mean by “authority”, and begin to think about measures of quality and reliability for legal text that avoid the creation of unnatural monopolies in legal information.

As a step in that direction LII has started a guest blog, VoxPopuLII, which will include big ideas from “folks in all different tribes in all different places on the intellectual and global map”.

We’ll be in touch, Tom.

(Hat tip to Joe Ury)

The future of lawyers

From my review of The End of Lawyers?:

Susskind sees improved access to justice being achieved with the following building blocks:

• the empowered citizen – using the web to recognise when they have a legal problem, select an appropriate service provider and obtain service
• streamlined law firms  – who have decomposed their work and multi-sourced as described above
• a healthy third sector
• entrepreneurial alternative providers – who will find new and improved ways of delivering conventional legal services (encouraged, particularly, by the Legal Services Act)
• accessible legal information systems, and
• enlightened public information policy

(cue FreeLegalWeb).

FreeLegalWeb is ABetterWay

I have it from the horse’s mouth at the Cabinet Office that we have won something in the POI Task Force’s ShowUsABetterWay competition. Not sure yet what this means, but we can certainly count on Task Force support in some form to develop the idea to the next stage.

According to this morning’s Guardian Technology article, five ideas have won hard cash: Can I Recycle It?, UK Cycling, School Catchment Areas, Location of Postboxes and Loofinder – the overall winner to be announced on Saturday.

We’ve been selected as one of five other ideas to “improve/mock up”: naturally FreeLegalWeb is not as self-defining an idea as Loofinder or any of the other cash winners.

Four other ideas submitted are already “fully working”.

The 5 winners

Can I Recycle It?
UK Cycling
School Catchment Areas
Location of Postboxes in Rural Area
Loofinder

Another 5 to “improve/mock up”

Road Works API
Oldienet
Free Legal Web
Allotment Manager
Where Does My Money Go

And 4 “fully working” already

UK Schools Map | site
SchoolGuru | site
Where’s the Path | site
Wreck Map | site

A lamentable state of affairs

Marcel Berlins in The Guardian , 3 November:

Last week, an obscure case on a technical legal point exposed an alarming failure to meet the condition that the law must be accessible to all. Moreover, as an angry and worried appeal court judge, Lord Justice Toulson, made clear, the problem was not confined to the narrow area of law in that particular case. It raised a far wider issue. …

To put it bluntly, it was almost impossible to find out exactly what the law said. Lord Justice Toulson pointed out that most of our law today is not contained in acts of parliament but in secondary legislation, regulations and the like. On many subjects the law can’t be found in one place, but in a patchwork. “There is no comprehensive statute law database with hyperlinks which would enable an intelligent person, by using a search engine, to find out all the legislation on a particular topic.”

He went on: “It is profoundly unsatisfactory if the law itself is not practically accessible … even to the courts whose constitutional duty it is to interpret and enforce it.”

What particularly concerns Toulson is that this “lamentable state of affairs” affects many areas of law which have great impact on the ordinary citizen, including sensitive childcare issues and social security benefits. There is a laudable government project to create a single, free, online legislation service which would bring together all the bits and pieces of a particular law. The trouble is that progress has been slow, it’s costing a lot of money and in the meantime new legislation is proliferating at unprecedented speed.

Props to Lord Justice Toulson for highlighting the need for the FreeLegalWeb – “a single, free, online … service which would bring together all the bits and pieces of a particular law”.

[The case in question was R v Chambers [2008] EWCA Crim 2467]

BarCamp report

In London on 18 October 24 enthusiastic souls gave up their Saturday to share their ideas on how we might achieve our seemingly impossible task.

My intro attempted to define the project: in essence, better, joined-up, value-added access to the law via a) direct access to the law itself and b) expertly authored commentary; and to identify the main obstacles: which for me boil down to two: addressability of law sources and incentivising and “certifying” sufficiently expert contributions.

John Sheridan of OPSI then described what the government could do to support a project such as ours and the prospective merging of OPSI legislation and the SLD which will rationalise access. Joe Ury pointed to tools that could be applied to gain better access to BAILII resources and also clarified the murky issue of copyright in High Court judgments which stands in the way of fully open access to them.

Several barristers, solicitors and students contributed experiences and ideas, particularly as to incentivising others to contribute authoritative content.

Members of the TSO team contracted to OPSI gave us information on the OPSI programming interface being developed and several others of a technical bent described how lightweight technologies might be applied – in particular, several associated with the mySociety information democracy project who have already done great work with projects related to the cause such as TheyWorkForYou and WhatDoTheyKnow.

In the afternoon four discussion groups considered different aspects of the project in more detail:

John Sheridan led a group that considered the target audience, using as a starting point OPSI research on use of the OPSI legislation site. OPSI has profiled four typical classes of user: lawyers, public sector manager, informed layman and the “anti-user” whose attempt to address their problem via the site is entirely inappropriate.

Jeni Tennison of TSO worked with a group to refine OPSI’s proposed permanent URI scheme for legislation which will allow direct addressing of legislation down to the smallest fragment and which will also enable point-in-time queries.

Francis Davey led a group which came up with an ingenious proposed “eco-system” employing several modules: a Google Knol-type environment for authoring contributions (which would be owned by the author and could be syndicated back onto their own site), an authentication module; a Yahoo answers-type module; a legislation/case annotation module; and an API which would resolve references and provide a rich interface to the wider web. All these modules could be based on existing open source tools and shared legal information resources.

Harry Metcalfe’s group extended this discussion, considering several use case scenarios and how the service might meet their needs: practitioner, law librarian and informed user (all within scope) and ill-informed user (without). For example, the mother of a disabled child who had done some initial research and had sufficient direction to pursue her problem would find value; the ill-informed “pub” question would likely draw a blank. The group also discussed how potential authors might self-certify by subscribing to the rules of the “brand”.

At the closing session we agreed on key next steps. Apart from organisational issues, foremost amongst these is to address the question of funding.

We agreed those interested in getting their hands dirty would meet again mid-January.

[Participants please point out any inaccuracies in the above.]

A Problem of Definition?

Nick’s most recent post on the question of contributions raises some interesting points, and I think shows that we need to strip the ‘Free Legal Web’ back to its irreducible core, and find out exactly what we think it should mean. But first, to respond to some of Nick’s points:

We already have a substantial body of authored contributions being made on blogs in particular. Nearly Legal himself has been blogging intelligent legal commentary for over 2 years; he has now also attracted joint contributors and these collective comtributions – CC licensed – now form part of the free legal web. Transform this and all similar resources to the Free Legal Web – ie repurpose them in creative ways (with permission) – and most contributions will look after themselves.

As good as Nearly Legal’s blog is, or any other specialist law blog, it cannot hope to compete with the the articles, case commentaries, and so on found in bona fide legal journals, and monographs. Academics and practitioners will continue to publish in them, and publishers will continue to make profit from them. It is (perhaps unfortunately) a mutually profitable relationship.

There’s reason to be optimistic too about leveraging law firm publications. These articles are written to be read, to reflect well on the authors and their firms and to gain them business.

The more informal/less influential practice newsletters published by firms may be useful to some degree, but I cannot see them being key to this initiative. Nobody cites those newsletters, so why should people use the Free Legal Web for research purposes, or visit it at all, if that is all it contains?

I think there are many issues here, but one of the first things that needs to be addressed is: what is the Free Legal Web? There seems to be a generally-held view (including my own), based on the comments of Nearly Legal, Geeklawyer and others, that a true ‘wikipedia of English law’ will be just that – the sum total of all knowledge and learning that English law has to offer. But that cannot be right; there can be no competition with the key texts in any area of law. Wikipedia itself is a different beast to a law Wikipedia. Why would anyone go to, and cite, the Free Legal Web’s entry on non-delivery of goods, when you could look up the section in Benjamin on Sale? Why look at the user-generated piece on choice of law in contract, when you could skim through Dicey & Morris? These will be the texts that judges use, that advocates read to inform their arguments, and that academics write. What, then, is the incentive to contribute to the Free Legal Web?

So, we may have to aim for something less, at least at first. Nick’s post seems to envisage the pooling together of all current commentary on blogs and in newsletters, and that seems eminently feasible. So, a case is published by OPSI and repurposed in to the Free Legal Web; a blog or law firm comments, and that is fed into the FLW as well, semantically linked to the case. Excellent. If the Free Legal Web is to work, then that may be where the battlelines have to be drawn.

Better than the rest

I’ve submitted the idea to Show Us a Better Way.