New Legal Document Tools Announced

 

MaxPixel.net

Documents are the summer wheat that we make our court case bread (final product) from.  We have two interesting announcements to share in this week’s post from The Effectiveness Project and LegalXML LegalRuleML.

 

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From our friend Bob Ambrogi we learned about “The Effectiveness-Project” or:

“What Every Legal Professional Should Know for Effective & Efficient Drafting in Word is intended to establish legal professionals “a baseline understanding for the document-creation work valued in the legal ecosystem, define parameters for the work, and set expectations for quality, effort, and result.””

They have published guides in three formats; “interactive web pages, full downloadable PDF, and stand-alone modules organized by drafting stage” to identify “the work that goes into creating a legal document, then we divided it into stages and tied individual tasks and technology to the work. To make this document unique from LTC4’s learning plan “Working with Legal Documents,” and serve as a business tool, rather than a training plan, the document incorporates these elements:

1. A conceptual analysis of each stage

2. Recommendations for how legal professionals can advance their skills

3. References to native Microsoft Word functionality and related professional-level tools

The guide is available through the Effectiveness Project website at https://ltc4.org/effectiveness-project/ 

This is terrific work we can use in the courts not only at the appellate level, but also in designing forms and our online dispute resolution systems.

 

LegalXML LegalRuleML releases Core Specification 1.0

The OASIS LegalRuleML Technical Committee members have approved submitting the following Committee Specification LegalRuleML Core Specification Version 1.0

The objective of the LegalRuleML Core Specification Version 1.0 is to define a standard (expressed with XML-schema and Relax NG and on the basis of Consumer RuleML 1.02) that is able to represent the particularities of the legal normative rules with a rich, articulated, and meaningful mark-up language. 

“The work enables modeling and reasoning that allows implementers to structure, evaluate, and compare legal arguments constructed using the rule representation tools provided.”

The specifications are available in the following formats at the links are provided below:

HTML (Authoritative): https://docs.oasis-open.org/legalruleml/legalruleml-core-spec/v1.0/cs02/legalruleml-core-spec-v1.0-cs02.html

DOCX:

https://docs.oasis-open.org/legalruleml/legalruleml-core-spec/v1.0/cs02/legalruleml-core-spec-v1.0-cs02.docx

PDF:

https://docs.oasis-open.org/legalruleml/legalruleml-core-spec/v1.0/cs02/legalruleml-core-spec-v1.0-cs02.pdf

For an exploration of the standard in their paper “Enabling Reason with LegalRule ML” to “to automate verification process, regulatory rules written in natural language need to be translated into a format that machines can understand” see: https://arxiv.org/abs/1711.06128