Law Librarian Blog

What Other Courts Have Said About This Case: Applying Negative Treatment Analytics to Court Opinion Data by way of Fastcase's Bad Law Bot

Mindful of the forthright caveats expressed in the below video, Fastcase's Bad Law Bot sounds like a very interesting programming experiment using a dataset of files that are not enhanced with court treatment metadata. Hopefully someone will produce a comparative study of Fastcase's Authority Check, now including Bad Law Bot, with BLaw, Lexis and West citation services for negative treatment results. Signal confirmation by actually reading cited opinions will be required, as it always should be.

Remember when KeyCite was still indicating that Michigan v. Jackson, 475 U.S. 625 (1986) was good law some two weeks after being overruled by SCOTUS in Montejo v. Louisiana? See Maybe Westlaw thinks Scalia was wrong, but… (LLB, June 12, 2009). Shepard's got it right almost immediately. Would Fastcase's Bad Law Bot have?

For details about Bad Law Bot, see this Fastcase Blog post. See also, Greg Lambert's Fastcase's Bad Law Bot: "Big Data Applications For Legal Research" on 3 Geeks (and the comments to that post) and Jason Wilson's Building a citator through indirect crowdsourcing: Fastcase’s Bad Law Bot.

From the YouTube description:

Bad Law Bot is an enhancement to Fastcase's Authority Check feature that helps you determine whether your case is still good law. Fastcase CEO Ed Walters discusses the new feature and how to use it.

Bad Law Bot algorithmically scans citations in judicial opinions -- where a citation shows that a case has been overturned, Bad Law Bot plants a red flag to tell you so.

[JH]

Five Years After Zittrain's The Future of the Internet

See Ben Sobel, Kendra Albert, and Jonathan Zittrain's post on The Future of the Internet -- And How to Stop It for a review of developments in the context of predictions made in Zittrain's The Future of the Internet about the way consumer devices interact with the Internet. [JH]

DPLA Launches with 2.4 Million Records

The Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) launched a beta of its discovery portal and open platform on April 18, 2013. From the announcement:

The portal delivers millions of materials found in American archives, libraries, museums, and cultural heritage institutions to students, teachers, scholars, and the public. Far more than a search engine, the portal provides innovative ways to search and scan through its united collection of distributed resources. Special features include a dynamic map, a timeline that allow users to visually browse by year or decade, and an app library that provides access to applications and tools created by external developers using DPLA’s open data.

...

The DPLA portal is powered by a rich repository of information, known as the DPLA platform, which enables new and transformative uses of America’s digitized cultural heritage. With an application programming interface (API) and maximally open data, the DPLA can be used by software developers, researchers, and others to create novel environments for learning, tools for discovery, and engaging apps. The DPLA App Library features an initial slate of applications built on top of the platform; developers and hobbyists of all skill levels are freely able to make use of the data provided via the platform.

[JH]

How App Crazy are Lawyers?

According to an on-going poll on ABAJ News with 1,100 reader votes counted so far, 48.91% use no apps in their practice plus an additional 13.25% voted "what's an app?" [JH]

Obla di, obla da, life goes on: "ACTION REQUIRED TO CONTINUE YOUR SUBSCRIPTION" because one of AALL's "vendor partners" is at it again

We strive to obtain the maximum value for our institution's fiscal resources, while at the same time making judicious, analytical and rational use of our institution's information resources. -- AALL Ethical Principles (1999)

ACTION REQUIRED TO CONTINUE YOUR SUBSCRIPTION Dear LexisNexis® Subscriber: The next release of this publication will be delivered in eBook format via the LexisNexis® Download Center. You will no longer receive the printed version of this publication. Electronic delivery via the LexisNexis Download Center will increase the timeliness and currency of your newsletter subscription, in addition to reducing our impact on the environment. What do you need to do to ensure your subscription continues? Visit www.lexisnexis.com/eShift and complete the eBook processing form. This information will be used to transfer your subscription to eBook and enable access to the LexisNexis Download Center. You will then receive an initial email with your username, temporary password and a link to the LexisNexis Download Center. When you arrive at the Download Center for the first time, you will be asked to create a security question. After completing the security question, you will be logged into the Download Center and able to download material. What should you expect going forward? After providing an email address for your account, you will receive an email alert from LexisNexis when a new release of the publication becomes available. This email alert will include a link to the LexisNexis Download Center, where you may access the latest edition. To access the PDF, you will need to download Adobe Reader to your computer if you do not already have this program. Only the latest newsletter issue will be available on the LexisNexis Download Center. You will need to save and archive each edition for quick reference to previous issues. If you miss downloading an earlier release, you may contact Customer Support and ask that a copy be sent to you. Thank you for choosing LexisNexis products and services. If you have any questions about your subscription, please call us at 800.833.9844, email customer.support@lexisnexis.com or visit www.lexisnexis.com/printcdsc. Note Regarding Reuse Rights: The subscriber to this publication in .pdf form may create a single printout from the delivered .pdf. For additional permissions, please see www.lexisnexis.com/terms/copyright-permission-info.aspx. If you would like to purchase additional copies within your subscription, please contact Customer Support.

Without advance notice to invoice-paying law librarians, attentive serials check-in staff are spotting a form letter (sidebar right) inserted in the shipment of the last print copies of newsletter, bulletin and journal issues stating that their periodicals will no longer be published in print by Lexis.

Under the banner heading "ACTION REQUIRED TO CONTINUE YOUR SUBSCRIPTION", the "Dear LexisNexis® Subscriber" Notice states in its lead paragraph:

The next release of this publication will be delivered in eBook format via the LexisNexis® Download Center. You will no longer receive the printed version of this publication.

(Emphasis in the original.)

Further on, the Notice states:

Only the latest newsletter issue will be available on the LexisNexis Download Center. You will need to save and archive each edition for quick reference to previous issues. If you miss downloading an earlier release, you may contact Customer Support and ask that a copy be sent to you.

Note well, the Notice does not even identify the title of the publication. Also, it is not an eBook. Each forthcoming issue will be a PDF copy that the subscriber is permitted to print out once.

So the first action required... is to ask your serials check-in staff to write down the damn title on the Notice that has been eShift-ed by Lexis. To get started, here's the list of Lexis periodical titles Harvard Law School Library has be able to identify. It's only current as of the middle of last week:

• Environmental Law
• CA Family Law Monthly
• Commercial Damages Reporter
• CA Criminal Defense Reporter
• CA Environmental Law Reporter
• Business Crime
• Benders Health Care Law
• FL Family Law Reporter
• CA Real Estate Reporter
• TX Family Law Reporter
• TX Torts Update
• Warren Heaton Case Digest
• Benders CA Labor & Employment
• Construction Law Digest
• Benders Labor Employment Bulletin
• CA WCAB Noteworthy Panel Decisions
• Michies 4th Circuit Criminal Reporter
• MA Family Law Journal
• MN Family Law Journal
• TX Oil & Gas Law Journal

Do note that according to one librarian's exchange with a Lexis rep, sometime this summer Lexis will have online an archive of PDF-ed issues in case you have missed this eShift for an affected periodical. Until then, call your pBook-eBook rep before he or she is laid off in Albany. They are the best equipped to help with these pesky account management issues. In the alternative, just cancel the damn periodicals and demand a refund from your Lexis rep. Quoting from the Notice:

Thank you for choosing LexisNexis products and services.

Lexis claims "Electronic delivery via the LexisNexis Download Center will increase the timeliness and currency of your newsletter subscription, in addition to reducing our impact on the environment." Well, it will not increase timeliness and currency of the so-called "newsletter" (read "periodical") subscription until institutional buyers figure out how to archive and deliver to their user populations all forthcoming ePeriodical PDF issues. And that certainly will have an impact on libraries' tech services, IT, and user services environment unless what one only does is print out a single PDF copy and pretends the affected periodical is still published in print.

"Making judicious, analytical and rational use of our institution's information resources." How are libraries supposed to preserve and make accessible issues of titles affected? According to Lexis, download every damn PDF issue and host the ePeriodical's issues on your local server. How circa late-1990s web hosting is that! So get ready to have this conversation with your IT staff.

First we need a dummy email account. Something like "serial(dot)checkin@" will do. Then the library needs separate dark subdirectories on our web server for Environmental Law, CA Family Law Monthly, Commercial Damages Reporter, etc. After that, under each title's web page, we need "<ul><li></li><li></li>[and on and on until]</ul>."

You need to give our serials check-in staff permission to access the server so we can upload PDFs and insert identifier text with embedded links within each "<li></li>" segment. Or your department's staff needs to do this promptly so we can provide access each time an issue has been downloaded and emailed to your department.

For each subdirectory's web page the library also will need an RSS feed so we have a way to subscribe those members of our user population who want to know when an issue has been received and processed. Hopefully no one makes mistakes to the web page otherwise false update messages will be generated.

Yes, each ePeriodical title really must have its our subdirectory.The library needs a unique URL to include in our OPAC's bibliographic record by title to this dark archive when we update our bib records with an eShift note. Hey, I don't want to do this either but I'm not calling the technical processing shots, Lexis is. I'm just trying to deal with the consequences.

Yup, that's a "great" way for making "judicious, analytical and rational use of our institution's information resources." Of course, one also can ask the IT staff to start creating an in-house database or elending solution tied to a library's serials check-in and circulation modules but since no library yet knows how many and when their Lexis periodicals are being eShifted, it might be wise to just start with some basic HTML coded web pages for now.

ePeriodicals, no problem. Dumping this on institutional subscribers with no thought of how this migration is supposed to be efficiently executed by subscribers (in-house economics alert), just like the "free" eBook substitution for CDs, by Lexis, yes, problem.

"To obtain maximum value for our institution's fiscal resources." I understand that Harvard Law School Library has informed CRIV of this latest eFormat switcheroo executed by Lexis. It is unclear to me if the Executive Board knows what the hell is going on because the communication to CRIV was made right around the time E-Board members were traveling to and attending their Spring Meeting in Chicago. (Can you say "live and archived webcast of the proceedings if AALL really wants to be transparent in conducting our, not their, business?")

The meeting's agenda included approval of AALL's The Code of Best Practices for Licensing Electronic Resources. See Tab 14 of the Spring Meeting Board Book behind AALL's walled garden for the text. Assuming The Code was approved, apply it and AALL's Guide to Fair Business Practices (2012) to this latest eFormat substitution by Lexis.

Frankly I believe that exercise would just be a waste of time. By allowing vendors to be AALL members (full, associate, whatever), one of our association's so-called "Business Relationships" ethical principles, quoted above, is vacuous. Worse than that -- this ethical imperative only protects vendor members because their business plans trump library business plans according to the Fair Business Practices Guide.

It certainly is time to queue up this music video. [JH]

Lobbying for More Than Just UELMA

We all know the intent behind UELMA. Authentication, preservation and permanent public accessibility to the most basic state-level digital primary legal resources, namely "state constitutions, session laws, codified laws, and administrative rules with the effect of law" by state actors designated as "official publishers” to carry out the provisions of the Act in those instances where state governments are delivering such legal materials in electronic formats. After that it is game on because UELMA does not affect any contractual relationship between an official state publisher and a commercial publisher, nor does it affect copyright claims.

Is UELMA flawed because of what it leaves unaffected? Of course not. The Uniform Laws Commission could not venture into contract and copyright laws. However, as folks lobby for UELMA adoption (current status available on the ULA site see also AALL's 2013 bill tracking report) they may want to take a look at what is happening in California.

California was the second state to adopt UELMA. SB 1075 was signed into law by California Governor Jerry Brown on September 13, 2012. If my always faulty memory isn't up to its usual tricks, I believe the Act takes effect in 2015. However state copyright claims and state publishing contracts with a commercial vendor remain an issue.

Lobbying for Creative Commons licensing in addition to UELMA. Recently California Assemblyman Brian Nestande (R-42nd Dist.) tossed AB 292 into the bill hopper. It calls for applying a Creative Commons License to the California Code of Regulations to allow any individual, at no cost, to use, distribute, and create derivative works based on the material for either commercial or noncommercial purposes because the California Office of Administrative Law holds an exclusive copyright on the CCR. I doubt Assemblyman Nestande would mind if I republish his office's press release in full. So here it is:

The agency responsible for reviewing and approving new regulations, the Office of Administrative Law (OAL,) holds an exclusive copyright over regulations that are created with taxpayer dollars.  All taxpayers already fund the activities of government, including the creation of new regulations.  Restricting access to these regulations requires taxpayers to pay twice for the same government activity.  Because all taxpayers are bound by the law, businesses are compelled to pay for complete access to the regulations that bind them.  The cost of purchasing access to the regulations can vary from $30 to more than $3,000, depending on what sections of regulations are needed.

AB 292 will provide that the full text of the California Code of Regulations shall have an open access creative commons attribution license, allowing any individual, at no cost, to use, distribute and create derivative works based on the material for either commercial or noncommercial purposes.

While OAL is required to post a copy of the California Code of Regulations (CCR) on its Web site, it makes this version prohibitively difficult to navigate, and restricts access with the following restriction: “no part of this Web site may be reproduced, duplicated, copied, downloaded, stored, further transmitted, disseminated, transferred, or otherwise exploited without Thomson Reuters’ prior written consent.”  These restrictions require businesses to purchase complete access from Thomson Reuters, from which OAL derives a share of the profits.

When the Legislature enhances the profitably of an activity, it incentivizes that activity.  By allowing OAL to profit from access to taxpayer funded activities, the Legislature is inherently making a statement that California needs more regulations.  By giving a profit motive to approve regulations, it incentivizes the approval of more regulations.

Allowing OAL to profit from the sale of access to the regulations it has the authority to approve creates an inherent conflict of interest.  OAL currently uses its proprietary copyright to issue an exclusive license to Thomson Reuters in exchange for a $400,000 annual license fee and 7% of all royalties.  As more businesses are covered by new regulations, more businesses need to purchase access to those regulations from Thomson, and OAL derives a larger profit.  This makes it difficult to be truly objective when approving new regulations, if it directly benefits from expanding the state’s regulatory burden.

Due to the restrictions OAL sets forth on access to state regulations, search engines such as Google cannot legally access and index the CCR.  In addition, developers cannot create user-friendly applications for smartphones and tablets that would allow the public to easily access, manipulate, and share regulations. This in turn can limit innovation and transparency.

Additionally, because of these restrictions to the CCR no individual can legally reproduce the text of a regulation.  This prevents covered entities from freely sharing and discussing new regulations.  Even a petition to repeal a regulation would violate OAL’s copyright if it quotes from the text of that regulation. This hindering of political speech is counter to an open and transparent government.

Finally, access to statutes and regulations should be consistent across all of California government.  Unlike OAL’s copyright over administrative law, the Legislature holds no copyright over the laws it creates.  Legislative Counsel covers the cost of making laws and is available to every taxpayer because this is a proper and legitimate role of government.

By making the CCR free and readily available to the public, we are creating a more transparent government and easing the burden on businesses that must purchase access to the regulations that bind them.

In those instances where states claim copyright ownership of primary legal resources, UELMA lobbyists might want to look to AB 292 for model language to include or at least submit as companion legislation. Such language should also eliminate any commerical publisher's copyright claims to section heading texts in codifications of otherwise public domain primary legal resources if created by the publisher. This way any individual could at no cost easily use, distribute, and create derivative works based on the material for either commercial or noncommercial purposes.

End note: Granted potential separation of powers issues abound but I would push further for Creative Commons licensing of state publications. For example the Ohio Judicial Conference, an independent statutory entity within the judicial branch of government, claims copyright ownership for Ohio Jury Instructions. Lexis has the contract to publish OJI in print. List price is a whopping $544. Compare that to other state agency authored pattern jury instructions pricing.

Granted Lexis OJI includes some editorial enhancements -- "explanatory Committee Notes, references to Ohio Revised Code sections, cases and other materials for your own research," is updated at no small expense, and even includes a CD (not yet, if ever, to be replaced by a "free" eBook). But for a print version, Lexis OJI is the only game in the Buckeye State.

For online distribution of OJI, the Ohio Judicial Conference currently limits licensing to three vendors. At the moment they are Lexis, West and Casemaker. Why not more? To create a bidding war? Isn't it time to stop an "independent statutory entity within the judicial branch of government" from milking this cash cow?

I have no doubt that watchdogs in other states can find similiar examples at many, if not most, branches of state government. [JH]

Google and Open Source Feeds: Here Today, Gone Tomorrow?

There's more going on than Google just eliminating Reader. For example, TechCruch reports that Google has killed its RSS subscription extension for Chrome. And then there is Feedburner. Google acquired the RSS/Atom feed management company in June 2007 for $100 million. Pocket change for Google. TechCrunch's Frederic Lardinois writes:

I always assumed Google would keep Feedburner on life support for as long as it could, but the fact that they are shutting down Reader shows that they are willing to make these unpopular moves and close products that form the basis of a larger ecosystem (I’m sure the teams at Reeder, Feedly and other Google Reader-based services are scrambling right now). I can’t imagine that Feedburner will live through many more of these spring cleanings given that it is Google’s last RSS-focused product that’s still standing.

For more, see his post, The Google Reader Shutdown Is Yet Another Nail In Feedburner’s Coffin (NB: TechCrunch's own feeds use Feedburner's feed management system.)

By far, the best article I have read about the strategic business changes underway at Google is Felix Salmon's Did Google just kill RSS? (Reuters think piece; hat tip to Mark's post) Salmon closes his analysis and commentary with some thoughts about RSS (let's add Atom):

RSS has been dying for years — that’s why Google killed Reader. It was a lovely open format; it has sadly been replaced with proprietary feeds like the ones we get from Twitter and Facebook. That’s not an improvement, but it is reality. Google, with Reader, was really providing the life-support mechanism for RSS. Once Reader is gone, I fear that RSS won’t last much longer.

Others have a more optimistic outlook. Some view the demise of Reader as reinvigorating innovation and competition in open source feed desktop apps and sync platforms. Only time will tell. [JH]

Open States: A non-profit, non-partisan public resource for monitoring state legislative activity

"If you're interested in your state lawmaker, you'll be able to get notifications for their actions, a map of their district, voting records, committee assignments, campaign finance records from Influence Explorer, local news articles and contact information. If you're curious about a particular piece of legislation, Open States allows you to check on its status, find the sponsors, break down votes, view bill text and all supporting documents. Our powerful search capabilities allow you to find similar topics across states and view overview pages for each state, chamber and committee." --- Nicko Margolies, Open States: Find and Follow Your State Capitol (Sunlight Foundation Blog, Feb. 14, 2013)

In February of 2009, the Sunlight Foundation announced that its next big goal was "The Fifty State Project." The objective was to provide the same sort of access to legislative data and related information OpenCongress did but for all 50 states from one website. Not an easy task but the Foundation stayed the course. Last month the Sunlight Foundation announced the launch of the full Open States site.

After more than four years of work from volunteers and a full-time team here at Sunlight we're immensely proud to launch the full Open States site with searchable legislative data for all 50 states, D.C. and Puerto Rico. Open States is the only comprehensive database of activities from all state capitols that makes it easy to find your state lawmaker, review their votes, search for legislation, track bills and much more.

Let's add that Open States data is available for bulk downloading.

Give Open States a test drive. Some may want to toss it into an ALR lecture on researching state legislation. Others may want to add the resource as an alternative to very expensive research offerings for monitoring state legislation. And some may even want to experiment with repurposing the data made available by bulk downloads. For an introductory tutorial, see Exploring State Legislative Data.

Just as OpenCongress has evolved since 2009, my hunch is Open States also will. [JH]

On Widening, More Likely Than Bridging, Any Existing In-House Content-Distribution Divide

Linking librarians to IT adds a necessary quality to the negotiation of contracts for online research services. An emphasis on the content delivered via the contract demands librarian input. They will have worked with the practice groups and can build on these relationships to understand which resources are necessary to maintain a high quality practice. The librarian’s task will be to consolidate this information across the firm and make it possible for the IT Department to negotiate a contract from a content point of view. Here, too, there will be a return on investment. A low cost contract without value adds expense.

Too often the library director becomes embroiled as an adversary in the negotiation process. This compromises the librarian’s relationship with the vendor and jeopardizes the negotiating process. Knowledge about content and lawyer demand is not the same as knowledge about pricing. And while the IT Department may need help with both the pricing terms and the negotiation process, that help will not come from the library. The vendor relationship demanded in the negotiation process is different from the relationship expected when the contract is in place and services are being delivered. Nothing should jeopardize the service delivery, which should be spelled out by the terms of the contract.

Understanding this, it is a gift to librarians to limit their involvement in contract negotiations. They can pass on an understanding of what the firm demands and force the vendor to consider the stake they have in the next contract with the firm. The vendors need to be accountable for the real relationship of pricing and content to contract terms. With that in mind, IT can demand a contract that has no surprises ahead. -- Nina Cunningham, Leveraging the Assets of the Law Library, (LJN's Legal Tech Newsletter, Feb. 2013, republished here).

(Emphasis added.)

Really? Or to quote Greg Lambert, "Um, thanks?" (Emphasis not added.)

Lambert adds "My own thoughts on vendor negotiations, and what I'm hoping where Cunningham is intending to go with this argument, is that there is some value in negotiating with the vendors in a unified way." There certainly is some value. But not, in my opinion, by way of the over-generalized role characterizations in Cunningham's far too simplified recipe.

For much more about this and other topics addressed in Cunningham's article, see Lambert's Are IT and Library "Logical Partners" in Leveraging Library Assets? Highly recommended. Cunningham's Leveraging the Assets of the Law Library, of course, is also highly recommended. [JH]

Opening PACER

Hat tip to Legal Research Plus for calling attention to OpenPACER.org's draft bill, The Open PACER Act of 2013.

The Open PACER Act provides for free and open access to electronic federal court records. The courts currently offer an expensive and difficult-to-use web site. They charge more than their cost of offering the service—more than Congress has authorized—violating the E-Government Act of 2002. This Act seeks to, once and for all, compel the courts to fulfill Congress' longstanding vision of making this information "freely available to the greatest extent possible".

[JH]

Google+, Thomson Reuters and Metadata in Free Law

Google+, Thomson Reuters and metadata in OA law were the topics discussed in Friday's episode of LawLibCom. Jean O'Grady and Elmer Masters joined hosts Richard Leiter and Marcia Dority Baker and panelists, Ken Hirsh, Sarah Glassmeyer and Elizabeth Farrell. If you missed the live podcast, you can listen to it here. [JH]

Pew: Americans Like Technology in Libraries

American Libraries highlights the latest Pew Internet & American Life Project report, Library Services In The Digital Age.  Here are some of the statistics from the Executive Summary:

The availability of free computers and internet access now rivals book lending and reference expertise as a vital service of libraries. In a national survey of Americans ages 16 and older:

• 80% of Americans say borrowing books is a “very important” service libraries provide.
• 80% say reference librarians are a “very important” service of libraries.
• 77% say free access to computers and the internet is a “very important” service of libraries.

Moreover, a notable share of Americans say they would embrace even wider uses of technology at libraries such as:

• Online research services allowing patrons to pose questions and get answers from librarians:  37% of Americans ages 16 and older would “very likely” use an “ask a librarian” type of service, and another 36% say they would be “somewhat likely” to do so. 
• Apps-based access to library materials and programs: 35% of Americans ages 16 and older would “very likely” use that service and another 28% say they would be “somewhat likely” to do so.
• Access to technology “petting zoos” to try out new devices: 35% of Americans ages 16 and older would “very likely” use that service and another 34% say they would be “somewhat likely” to do so.
• GPS-navigation apps to help patrons locate material inside library buildings: 34% of Americans ages 16 and older would “very likely” use that service and another 28% say they would be “somewhat likely” to do so.
• “Redbox”-style lending machines or kiosks located throughout the community where people can check out books, movies or music without having to go to the library itself: 33% of Americans ages 16 and older would “very likely” use that service and another 30% say they would be “somewhat likely” to do so.
• “Amazon”-style customized book/audio/video recommendation schemes that are based on patrons’ prior library behavior: 29% of Americans ages 16 and older would “very likely” use that service and another 35% say they would be “somewhat likely” to do so.

I’m intrigued by some of these such as the desire for GPS-navigation apps.  I suspect the day can’t be far off when bar codes are either replaced or supplemented by RFD chips embedded in books.  The technology may allow not only locating the book on the shelf but circulating them as well.  Then there is the ability to find mis-shelved books via tracking technology.

Americans certainly see libraries as forward-thinking when implementing technology.  In that regard, the American Library Association recently honored five libraries for technology based cutting-edge services.  Some of these are quite novel.  For example, the Goethe-Institut New York Library teamed up with the Pratt Institute School of Information and Library Science to develop German Traces NYC.  The app overlays augmented reality images over images from a mobile device’s camera to show German cultural heritage in New York.  Personally, I’m holding out for Google Glasses to take advantage of this kind of technology.  I’ve been keen on the product coming to market since I first heard of the concept. 

More on the awards for other cutting-edge technology in libraries is available from ALA here. [MG] 

Law's Information Revolution: On the advent of quantitative legal prediction in the professional legal services industry

Hat tip to Edward Bryant's The Intelligent Solutions Blog post for calling attention to Quantitative Legal Prediction – or – How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Start Preparing for the Data Driven Future of the Legal Services Industry, 62 Emory Law Journal ___ (Forthcoming 2013) [SSRN] by Daniel Martin Katz (Michigan State College of Law). Here's the abstract:

Do I have a case? What is our likely exposure? How much is this going to cost? What will happen if we leave this particular provision out of this contract? How can we best staff this particular legal matter? These are core questions asked by sophisticated clients such as general counsels as well as consumers at the retail level. Whether generated by a mental model or a sophisticated algorithm, prediction is a core component of the guidance that lawyers offer. Indeed, it is by generating informed answers to these types of questions that many lawyers earn their respective wage.

Every single day lawyers and law firms are providing predictions to their clients regarding their prospects in litigation and the cost associated with its pursuit (defense). How are these predictions being generated? Precisely what data or model is being leveraged? Could a subset of these predictions be improved by access to outcome data in a large number of 'similar' cases. Simply put, the answer is yes. Quantitative legal prediction already plays a significant role in certain practice areas and this role is likely increase as greater access to appropriate legal data becomes available.

This article is dedicated to highlighting the coming age of Quantitative Legal Prediction with hopes that practicing lawyers, law students and law schools will take heed and prepare to survive (thrive) in this new ordering. Simply put, most lawyers, law schools and law students are going to have to do more to prepare for the data driven future of this industry. In other words, welcome to Law's Information Revolution and yeah - there is going to be math on the exam.

[JH]

Beyond the Wire-Agency Age: Does “Reuters Next” signal changes for WestlawNext and, if so, what sort of changes?

I was disappointed by the launch of WLN, not for the marketing nonsense about WestSearch, but because content integration with Reuters news was not embedded within WLN. Perhaps the Coding Demigods were unable to make that work (assuming that anyone in the Land of 10,000 Invoices was thinking about adding Reuters content like BLaw was doing with Bloomberg news content). Joe Pompeo reports on a major tech overhaul underway for Reuters. From Pomeo's Reuters gutting web infrastructure for 'Reuters Next,' its big online retooling (Capital): 

At a glance, Reuters.com looks as prolific and well-designed as the homepage of any news orgnization with resources as its disposal. But fundamental inefficiencies lurk beneath the surface.

The most egregious of these is the difficulty of inserting hyperlinks, people who know their way around the back-end told Capital.

"The current site was built on a legacy system conceived in the wire-agency age," said one of them.

Nor are video embeds a piece of cake. And with the exception of the homepage, live-blogs and other special features, content ends up where it does as a result of automation rather than human intervention.

But Reuters is working on a sweeping web relaunch that's expected to debut sometime in the first quarter of 2013, according to people familiar with the plans.

Known internally as "Reuters Next," the new reuters.com will be a "state of the art" offering with a redesigned front-end and a proprietary content management system built from scratch, said our sources, who described the site as being remodeled into editor-curated, stream-based channels such as world news, politics, business and tech.

Time to wait 'n see if "Reuters Next" content will be repurposed into WLN for a 21st century content delivery system like BLaw incorporated multi-format resources from Bloomberg News and then built upon the readily available IT back-end. Perhaps it will even go beyond Reuters content. Could this "state of the art" ground-up CMS be ported over to WLN for in-house editor curation for secondary sources via WLN and eBook formats? For updating them without being tied to print publication cycles?

Hat tip to Jason Wilson. Perhaps he also is thinking about the CMS implications. See his The “Next” Strategy: Does “Reuters Next” hint at changes for WestlawNext? [JH]

The Obama Administration's 2012 National Data Strategy

Hat tip to Text Radar's Alice Wilson for calling attention to the National Strategy For Information Sharing and Safeguarding (Dec. 2012). From the Executive Summary:

Our national security depends on our ability to share the right information, with the right people, at the right time. This information sharing mandate requires sustained and responsible collaboration between Federal, state, local, tribal, territorial, private sector, and foreign partners. Over the last few years, we have successfully streamlined policies and processes, overcome cultural barriers, and better integrated information systems to enable information sharing. Today’s dynamic operating environment, however, challenges us to continue improving information sharing and safeguarding processes and capabilities. While innovation has enhanced our ability to share, increased sharing has created the potential for vulnerabilities requiring strengthened safeguarding practices. The 2012 National Strategy for Information Sharing and Safeguarding provides guidance for effective development, integration, and implementation of policies, processes, standards, and technologies to promote secure and responsible information sharing.

The Strategy focuses on achieving five goals:

1. Drive Collective Action through Collaboration and Accountability.
2. Improve Information Discovery and Access through Common Standards.
3. Optimize Mission Effectiveness through Shared Services and Interoperability.
4. Strengthen Information Safeguarding through Structural Reform, Policy, and Technical Solutions.
5. Protect Privacy, Civil Rights, and Civil Liberties through Consistency and Compliance.

For an overview, see David Perera's White House data strategy calls for standardized metadata and identity authentication on FierceGovernmentIT.

On a related note, CRS issued The Protection of Classified Information: The Legal Framework on Dec. 17, 2012. From the Summary:

The publication of secret information by WikiLeaks and multiple media outlets, followed by news coverage of leaks involving high-profile national security operations, has heightened interest in the legal framework that governs security classification and declassification, access to classified
information, agency procedures for preventing and responding to unauthorized disclosures, and penalties for improper disclosure. Classification authority generally rests with the executive branch, although Congress has enacted legislation regarding the protection of certain sensitive information. While the Supreme Court has stated that the President has inherent constitutional authority to control access to sensitive information relating to the national defense or to foreign affairs, no court has found that Congress is without authority to legislate in this area.

This report provides an overview of the relationship between executive and legislative authority over national security information, and summarizes the current laws that form the legal framework protecting classified information, including current executive orders and some agency regulations pertaining to the handling of unauthorized disclosures of classified information by government officers and employees. The report also summarizes criminal laws that pertain specifically to the unauthorized disclosure of classified information, as well as civil and administrative penalties. Finally, the report describes some recent developments in executive branch security policies and legislation currently before Congress (S. 3454).

[JH]

In the Beginning There Was Pong

"On Nov. 29, 1972, a crude table-tennis arcade game in a garish orange cabinet was delivered to bars and pizza parlors around California, and a multi-billion-dollar industry was born. Here's how that happened, direct from the freaks and geeks who invented a culture and paved the way for today's tech moguls, writes BuzzFeed's Chris Stokel-Walker. For details, see Atari Teenage Riot: The Inside Story Of Pong And The Video Game Industry's Big Bang. [JH]

Professor Big Brother Is Watching

There is a story in the Chronicle of Higher Education highlighting the metrics available to a faculty member who assigns an e-textbook for the course:

When students use print textbooks, professors can’t track their reading. But as learning shifts online, everything students do in digital spaces can be monitored, including the intimate details of their reading habits.

Those details are what will make the new CourseSmart service tick. Say a student uses an introductory psychology e-textbook. The book will be integrated into the college’s course-management system. It will track students’ behavior: how much time they spend reading, how many pages they view, and how many notes and highlights they make. That data will get crunched into an engagement score for each student.

The feature is ostensibly marketed as something good.  Faculty can reach out to students who show low engagement and counsel them for success.  How about some of the other possible uses for the capability?  The same information may be useful to authors and publishers in analyzing how their text is used by students.  Some of the data may also be used by school administrators to evaluate faculty performance through that same level of student engagement.  My point is really that when a pool of information is collected, there can be many uses beyond that intended.  In any event, it’s another example of what was previously not measurable becoming extremely measurable.  I can see it now:  Hey, lets do a study comparing student performance across racial and ethnic groups.  I know there are laws that protect student information and also regulate studies using human subjects.  I have a feeling that helping students to succeed will be the least of the interesting uses for this capability.  [MG]

Two App Developments That Could Pave the Way to the Future ... Someday

First off, Bloomberg has launched the Bloomberg App Portal for Bloomberg's financial data services subscribers. From the press release:

Applications on the Bloomberg App Portal are developed by software companies, financial institutions, academics and other third parties. The Bloomberg App Portal enables Bloomberg subscribers to enhance their user experience by adding specialty features and tools that complement those available on the Bloomberg Professional service.

The Bloomberg App Portal page indicate that these enterprise apps include data analysis, news and research, portfolio management and risk analysis, valuation and pricing, and visualization and technical analysis. According to published reports, Bloomberg will take 30 percent of app sales revenue but does not expect that to substantially increase its estimated $7 billion revenue. However, anything that keeps "users glued to its terminals for more of their working day" is a good thing. Quoting from Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson's Bloomberg launches iTunes-style platform (Financial Times).

Second, Bookboard has launched an iPad app that provides streaming access to children's eBooks. Currently in beta, the Company plans a commercial launch in 1Q 2013 with revenue coming from monthly subscriptions for unlimited access to its library of titles. The business model calls for publishers to receive royalties based on the number of pages read (and other factors). Founded by two former Adobe execs, will this be the first successful "Netflix of eBooks"? For more, see Laura Hazard Owen's Bookboard tries Netflix-like model for kids’ ebooks (paidContent).

Some Navel-Gazing. It is clearly significant when the market leader in financial data services, Bloomberg, opens its closed universe of data to third party enterprise app development for the Company's estimated 315,000 subscribers. Will we see a BLaw App Store someday? It certainly could be a way to fill a huge gaping hole in providing professional legal services beyond search and current awareness to increase its competitiveness with WEXIS and keep users glued to BLaw-BNA's online services.

Second, will we see the market leader in legal publishing, Thomson Reuters, take a Netflix-like approach to streaming its eBooks based on a subscription model? If so, it could be a quasi-eLending and discovery platform to counter Lexis' enterprise eLending solution. {JH]

What May Become the Next Normal in Pricing Online Legal Search in the 21st Century?

In the "good old days" when we aging and decrepit Boomer-gen law librarians were bright young things, very expensive legal search vendors only offered "everything." At that time, everything in the databased content inventory wasn't all that much. Soon enough, "everything" was limited to the non-academic law library market because certain resources were excluded from academic law library licenses.

Early on database vendors' pricing mechanism generated very high variable search costs in the private and government sectors. While the private sector was then still able to charge back costs to clients, the government sector could not afford this model because, well you know, government entities have budgets to maintain. The call went out for some sort of in-plan access. "Impossible!" was the vendor responses based on false technology claims. Citing the differences in academic plans compared to the entire database universe model in private and government sectors plans, "impossible" became "possible."

Thus arrived the era of in-plan access with fixed costs with an out-of-plan option that included a variable cost component. Of course, fixed costs were and still are based on a mysterious pricing matrix that takes into account database selections, number of user accounts, number of legal professionals and various print tie-in arrangements at the institutional buyer's level. Ultimately, however, it boiled down to an institutional buyer's purchasing power, the negotiation skills of that buyer's representative, and, in the private sector, the consultants sometimes employed because the NDAs incorporated in licensing agreements prohibit sharing pricing data.

Those were the "select your database, then perform your search" days. With the next gen current gen WEXIS platforms, it is perform your search  and then filter your results largely by data elements that once were segment or field searches in former menu-driven database categories. Eliminating the marketing nonsense about how this or that vendor's metadata-enhanced SE is better than the "other guy's," buyers are still left with to options: (1) in-plan only negotable fixed rate or (2) in-plan with out-of plan variable rate. Of course what is "out-of-plan" does not necessarily mean "everything else." Access to "out-of-plan" databases is negotiable and oftentimes excludes much of the vendor's databased inventory to reduce variable costs. The clear trend, however, in the private sector is in-plan only licenses for a selected set of resources at a fixed rate for classic or next gen current gen WEXIS licenses.

Now comes the silliness. What is the point of next gen current gen WEXIS federated search engines if WEXIS doesn't provide its entire databased content inventory at a fixed rate? Why not stop applying a 20th century pricing scheme to a 21st century platform? "Impossible!" WEXIS will say but not for a psudeo-technological rationalization. Why then? Because WEXIS is still applying last century's revenue generation model to the 21st century as if the legal services industry has not changed permanently.

Will the "impossible" become possible as the next normal pricing scheme for very expensive online legal search if BLaw's flat rate pricing for that Company's entire database universe becomes a competitive threat to WEXIS?  That may depend on BLaw reducing its per seat flat rate for something less than institution-wide licenses.

For a little background on what may be the next normal in the 21st century from the institutional buyer's side of this equation, see The No Sacred Cow Models: Sole Provider, Primary Provider, or Multiple Narrow-Focused Providers for Online Legal Search in the Private Sector. [JH]

CJ Roberts: Emerging Technologies Present the Biggest Legal Challenge in Federal Courts, including SCOTUS

"Reconciling ever-changing science and technology with established Constitutional principles - set down by statutes and rulings long before the modern world was even imagined - will be an ongoing challenge for federal courts, especially his own, U.S. Chief Justice John Roberts said Wednesday {October 17, 2012] during a Rice University discussion reported the Houston Chronicle's Mike Tolson in Chief Justice Roberts: Technology among top issues for court.

"Is being able to see through walls a violation of search and seizure protections? I think it will be a good opportunity to see how prescient the framers were if the Constitution will be able to deal with these questions," Roberts told an audience of several thousand. "What is the fundamental protection offered by the Constitution when applied to new technology and situations? It's a question that comes along all the time."

Houston, that's the homebase of the very techno-knowledgeable 3 Geeksters. Perhaps SCOTUS should retain them as court-appointed advisors. Yup, this is just a quick comment as a follow-up to Mark Giangrande's much more timely Chief Justice Roberts Speaks post. Mark's post includes a video link to CJ Robert's presentation. Recommended. {JH}