Sadly, missing NELIC

Unfortunately, I cannot attend the New and Emerging Legal Infrastructures Conference ( NELIC) tomorrow.

Quantitive legal prediction and legal automation are subjects I am very interested in. I hope to submit a proposal for the next event.

The terrible beauty of dynamic documents

Ever since the world moved its information from atoms (clay tablets, paper etc.) to bits, we have seen an incredible increase in the volume, richness and sheer power of information.

Much of that power comes from the fact that information has become dynamic. Web pages are created and rendered *on demand*. WYSIWYG word processors construct a layout for a document *when you ask for it*. What you see on that web page is increasingly likely to be different from what I would see, if I looked too because the page is customized to you - your browser, your location, your profile history, the time of the request...etc. What I see when I open that PDF depends on what the embedded javascript does and it might well do something different for me than it would for you. Worse, it might do something different for me five minutes from now!

This phenomenon is accelerating and unleashing amazing things. However, we still live in a world where information such as a document is thought of in paper terms. I.e. something that is not invented on demand. Something that is the same for all observers. Something that will not change itself automatically over time. Much of the world of law revolves around that idea of stable information. Much of the world of regulatory oversight revolves around that idea too.

Well, it is becoming increasingly hard to wield IT with a stable-information world view. The world isn't going to row back from WYSIWYG or Web App Servers or Mashups ...and I'm not suggesting for a minute that it should. However, until such time as the legal world and the regulatory world find a way to live in a completely dynamic information environment, practitioners in those fields need to be very careful.

For years, I have been looking around for some crisp terminology to capture the challenge we face. I think I might have found it. Information is increasingly exogenous. Documents do not hold your information. Your information is the result of programs (such as WYSIWYG word processors) acting on the data (the documents).

If you have perfect replicas made of your documents, you haven't got a perfect replica of your information unless you are very careful to control the exogenous factors. Thankfully, for a lot of the worlds information, it does't really matter if you do it imperfectly. However, it really, really matters in the world of law and regulation.

Joyce the soothsayer

From an illustrated Finnegans Wake. c.f. irish debt and Bank of Ireland's amazing assessment from 2007.

Harvard bound

I plan to attend The Future of Law Libraries: The Future Is Now? at Harvard in June. Looking forward to participating, especially with respect to primary legal materials.

I see Carl will be talking about the Twelve Tables...I used those as a springboard for my talk on authenticity of legal materials at AALL 2009.

Under the hood of KLISS - a technical white paper

KLISS is built on top of the LWB platform. This white paper talks about how LWB, at a technical level, addresses the many challenges of legislative IT and the intricacies of legislatures/parliaments.

KLISS is alive and so am I

Well, I have been offline since XMas as a result of KLISS roll-out but I'm finally coming up for air.

For a whole bunch of very good reasons late last year, we added an internet facing front end to the KLISS system launch this year (in time for the 2011-12 legislative session).

KLISS phase 1 was mostly about the complex back-office functions of the legislature. In particular, replacing a very labor intensive, paper based bill processing system that involved scissors and colored pencils and glue sticks. (See the "flagged bill" in this short video).

Although adding a front-end to all of the new back-end machinery (circa 130 virtual machines of integrated back-office functions) added significantly to Propylon's coffee intake, we have made it through a very challenging timescale. The KLISS Internet-facing website is http://kslegislature.org.

We still have a lot of work to do to expose the power of the back-office systems on the website. The KLISS website truly is just the foyer into the vast factory complex where the real legislative content work takes place. It is in that behind-the-scenes factory that most of KLISS lives.

Over the next while I hope to blog more about how it all works under the hood and about plans for the future of KLISS. Now that we have the critical eDemocracy back-office platform in place, the sky is the limit on what we can do in information provision and services to legislators and the public.

I am very much looking forward to being a part of that.

Palfrey on open legislation

"This new legal information architecture must be grounded in a reconceptualization of the public sector’s role and draw in private parties, such as Google, Amazon, Westlaw, and LexisNexis, as key intermediaries to legal information." A new legal information environment for the future.