Legal Technologies

By Brian Harley • April 23rd, 2010

(Links to parts 1, 2, 3, and 4.)
Smart document generation
If giving legal advice is one of the two core skills of legal practitioners, the other is drafting legal documents. No matter what area of the law you practice in, you will need to generate a brief, a lease, a will, a contract, a certificate [...]

(Links to parts 1, 2, and 3.)
What can you do with the Semantic Web that you can’t do without it?
The Semantic Web is a powerful way of structuring data and giving it a precise, machine-readable meaning. The most obvious and immediate benefit of semantic technologies is in organizing large quantities of information in a particular [...]

If regular RSS and Google reader aren’t your preferred methods of consumption, you can receive a tweet each time we post a new story, which will be once or twice per week during the academic year.  Our Twitter name is columbiastlr, and you can find our Twitter page here.
To any aspiring Twitter-ers: signing up for [...]

(Check out Part 1 and Part 2, if you missed them.)
A machine-readable version of the law?
David Siegel, an entrepreneur and early blogger, recently published a book entitled Pull, The Power of the Semantic Web to Transform Your Business, the first “business” book about the Semantic Web. Siegel devotes one chapter to exploring the possible impact [...]

(If you missed part 1 of the series, check it out here.)
What is the Semantic Web?
The Semantic Web is a way of making data smart. The idea is, rather than building smart applications that can analyze “dumb” data, you make the data smart in the first place. The problem with dumb data is that the [...]

“Predicting the future is a hazardous business.” So cautions Richard Susskind in his recent exercise in legal futurology, The End of Lawyers? Rethinking the Nature of Legal Services, citing a number of amusingly inaccurate predictions made over the years about the future of IT. In a series of posts, I venture into that hazardous business [...]

Here’s the latest on the STLR radar:

Twitter is a source of evidence for a murder charge, reports the New York Daily News.  But could those tweets be copyrighted?  Law.com’s Law Technology News weighs in.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation provides a good, link-heavy analysis of the unanswered questions surrounding Google’s decision to stop censoring their Chinese services.

For [...]

Here’s the latest on the STLR radar:

Chief U.S. District Judge Vaughn Walker in San Francisco decided to allow showing the trial challenging California’s Proposition 8 on YouTube, reports the San Francisco Chronicle.  The Wall Street Journal Law Blog questions whether that’s a good thing.

Patent Librarian notes that Wikipedia citations in patent applications are up 59%, [...]

The American legal profession is not generally known for adopting new technology, setting up open access to laws and legal procedures, or offering things for free.  Internet culture is the opposite: fervently experimental, open, and free/shared whenever possible.  Private intersections of the two have fallen on a continuum, from closed and expensive like Lexis/Westlaw, to [...]

Given Google’s dominance in web searches, it seemed it would only be a matter of time before the company entered the legal arena.  This Tuesday, Google added the ability to freely search legal opinions and journal articles through Google Scholar.  According to Google Scholar’s documentation, the website provides state appellate and supreme court decisions since [...]