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Legal XML - History
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Subject: Legal XML - History
From: "Winters, Roger" <>
To:
Date: Wed, 18 Feb 2004 08:08:08 -0800
Title: Message
Here's an
"Overview" Web page from the Legal XML, Inc., Web site, providing a description
of the group's makeup, methods, governance, goals, and history.
Roger
Legal XML Overview
Mission
The Legal XML mission is to develop open, non-proprietary standards for
legal documents and associated applications.
Membership
Legal XML began with 18 members in November 1998. There are currently
871 members, many of whom actively participate in Workgroups
to develop or promote standards. There are 720 Participants
and 151 Observers.
Demographically, Legal XML members are made up of approximately 50%
private companies, 25% government, and 25% academic or non-profit
organizations. Legal XML members come primarily from the United States,
but there is an increasing international presence. About 25% of Legal XML
membership are non-U.S. with a large number of Australians, Canadians, and
Europeans.
Governance
Legal XML is governed by the Legal XML Operating Rules.
Decisions are made based on consensus.
All members have a voice in the process.
In the past, group consensus has been determined by taking polls. Existing polls have helped determine Legal XML
scope and other design principles. Polls also serve as a record of past
decisions. All new members are welcome to take existing polls.
Scope
Legal XML has both a theoretical and practical scope. Theoretically,
every electronic document that can be categorized as "legal" is within the
scope of Legal XML. Practically, however, it would be impossible to
describe all legal documents in XML all at once or even in a short time.
Further, there must be a balance between creating technically competent
and extensible standards and meeting short-term market demands. The
development process must be modest and iterative. As a result, there is a
practical limit to Legal XML's scope.
Theoretically, the Legal XML "domain" can be divided "vertically" and
"horizontally" into various "subdomains." For instance, vertical
subdomains include, but are not limited to, Court Filings, Transcripts,
Judicial Decisions, Public Law (e.g., legislation, bills, statutes),
Private Law (e.g., contracts, wills), and Publications (e.g., legal books,
law journals). Horizontal subdomains include Citations, General Vocabulary
(e.g., names, addresses), and Logical Document Structure (e.g., root
elements, tables, outlines, paragraphs, signatures, general structural
methodology). Horizontal subdomains cut across vertical subdomains. For
example, citations will be found in Court Filings, Case Law, Public Law
and Private Law documents. There is no need to recreate citation mark-up
for each vertical subdomain; instead, the same citation markup can be used
in all subdomains. Among other things, Legal XML seeks to harmonize and
coordinate the various horizontal and vertical subdomains within the
larger legal community.
Practically, Legal XML scope is determined pragmatically. If there is a
group of individuals willing to work to develop legal XML in any
particular subdomain, then that subdomain is within the practical scope of
Legal XML. That is, if a group of people exist who are willing to do the
work that falls within Legal XML's theoretical scope, then Legal XML will
help to facilitate and support the work.
Methodology
Although Legal XML is still young and developing, there is a set of
policies and a culture that is developing that guides the group and
informs its methodology. The following methodologies exist or are
developing in Legal XML:
· Form Partnerships
· Workgroups Led by Chairs
· Overinclusive and Optional
· Agree to Disagree Through Identifiable Extensions and Change
Management
· Two Interoperable Implementations
Form Partnerships
As a new organization, Legal XML does not have sufficient clout to
adequately promote its standards in a political sense. On the other hand,
Legal XML is quickly becoming a forum where people with both legal and
technical expertise can interact and develop standards. Accordingly, Legal
XML membership has sought to form partnerships with existing organization
that have both political clout and subject matter expertise. Legal XML has
partnered, formerly and informally, with organization such as the Joint
Technology Committee of COSCA/NACM, the National Court Reporters
Association, SEARCH, the California Administrative Office of the Courts,
and, recently, LEXML (Europe).
Workgroups Led by Chairs
Legal XML is divided into Workgroups, such as Court Filing and
Transcripts. Workgroups develop specifications that define the technical
XML standards. One or two chairs lead Workgroups. There are two
workgroups, LEGAL and HORIZONTAL, that attempt to harmonize work done by
other workgroups so that all standards are consistent. A TECHNICAL
workgroup works on difficult technical issues. A USERS workgroup exists
where non-technical members can ask questions and define requirements.
There is also a CHAIRS mailing list, comprised only of chairs, and an
ADMINISTRATION mailing list, where important leadership and administrative
decisions are made.
See the Workgroup
Webpage for a listing of all Workgroups and Chairs.
Agreement Where Possible
To date, the most active workgroups have been COURTFILING and
TRANSCRIPTS. The COURTFILING Workgroup is the first and only workgroup to
publish a "proposed" standard. Although there have been debates on a
number of topics, both on the workgroup mailing list and at meetings, the
workgroup has done an excellent job of agreeing where possible. When
agreement has not been possible, the group has taken an "overinclusive and
optional" approach.
Overinclusive and Optional
There are sometimes cases where one person or a small constituency
wants or needs, for example, "A", "B" and "C", but another constituency
wants or needs "C", "D", and "E". In these cases, the group has generally
included elements to meet everyone needs, but made the extra elements
optional. In this way, all the necessary elements are included in the
standard, but there is no requirement to use certain elements.
Being overinclusive and optional is advantageous because it provides a
basis for agreement and helps workgroups move forward quickly. The
disadvantage of "optionality" is that the standard becomes complex and
less standard. To solve this problem, at least in the case of the court
filing standard, the workgroup has agreed in principle to develop an
ancillary "policy" standard that will automate the process of determining
court policy with respect to optional elements. For instance, if element
"A" in the court filing specification is has three optional values, "X",
"Y", and "Z" then a court could specify in the ancillary court policy XML
a specific choice. Because court policy is itself specified in XML,
software applications can automatically determine policy (by fetching it
on the Internet).
Agree to Disagree Through Identifiable Extensions and Change
Management
XML technology is extensible in many ways in that it allows for
identifiable extensions to a core set of elements. Where agreement cannot
be achieved or where there has not been enough time to comprehensively
define a set of elements for all imaginable information (keep in mind the
theoretical versus practical scope explanation), Legal XML has developed a
policy of agreeing to disagree. For example, in the Court Filing proposed
standard, there are "safe harbor" zones in the DTD where it is technically
possible to use any element, even if it is not a standard element. In
other places, there are ways in which even non-XML content can be included
in a court filing. However, non-standard content may only appear in places
where the workgroup has agreed it may appear. Thus, there is a standard
way to deviate from the standard.
At the time of this writing, Legal XML's change management policy is
not fully developed, simply because the group needs more candidate
standards and more implementation experience. Some Legal XML members are
working on ways to provide for rational change management and version
control. Such change management will allow standards to evolve and develop
so that small amounts of work can be done over time.
Two Interoperable Implementations
As of this writing, Legal XML has not yet produced a final,
"recommended" standard. Legal XML has, however, published its first
"proposed" standard. (See "Document Categories," below, for an explanation
of "proposed" and "recommended" standards.) Although this may change, it
appears that Legal XML members are committed to requiring "two
interoperable" implementations of any "proposed" standard before a
standard will be considered "final" and "recommended."
History
The "Legal XML" idea is not new or original and, in fact, has a dated
history. In 1974 Charles F.
Goldfarb, a lawyer, invented Standard Generalized Markup Language
('SGML'). SGML became an international standard in 1986 (ISO 8879). In 1987,
Alan Asay, a brilliant lawyer and technologist, created civil and criminal
SGML document type definitions ('DTDs') for the Utah state courts. (Alan
Asay also wrote Utah's original Digital Signature Act, the first of its
kind in the world.) These two visionaries and inventors planted the
original Legal XML seeds.
Over ten years later, in February 1998, the World Wide Web Consortium ('W3C')
recommended eXtensible Markup
Language ('XML') as a standard. XML is a subset of SGML. XML has
eighty percent (80%) of SGML's power and is backwards compatible, but is
easier to use than SGML.
In February 1998, twenty five lawyers, court administrators, and
technologists participated in a virtual electronic court
filing seminar hosted by Counsel Connect. During the seminar, John
Messing suggested that XML be used as a basis for a standard
legal document format for court filings. John attributed the idea to
Winchel 'Todd' Vincent, with whom he had had previous conversations on the
subject. Todd got the idea from doing research, which included reading
articles by Alan Asay.
Some people in the forum had never heard of XML. Some joked that it
must be some sort of new religion. Some thought that XML was simply
another hyped Internet technology that would likely have a short life and
early death. Nevertheless, eleven people joined together to form the
"Legal XML Workgroup." The Utah Electronic
Law Partnership ('UELP'), headed by Brent Isrealsen, hosted the
original Legal XML Workgroup.
Unfortunately, the Workgroup never did any real work. The idea, simply,
was not ripe. Legal XML did not yet have a following.
Georgia State University's
Electronic Court Filing Project, led by Todd Vincent, was an original
member of the UELP Legal XML Workgroup. Throughout the spring and summer
of 1998, Todd promoted the idea of Legal XML standards. In late 1998, Gabe
Wachob at FindLaw and Todd at
Georgia State partnered in an effort to revive the Legal XML Workgroup.
Georgia State created and hosted a "developers" mailing list for people
who were interested in developing Legal XML DTDs and related standards. A
short time later, FindLaw created and hosted a "general" discussion
mailing list for people who were interested in standards, but who were not
interested in reading the technical details.
Independently, during the summer of 1998, Rich Himes, New Mexico
Federal District Court, another brilliant technologist and a colleague of
Alan Asay, was developing eXtensible Court
Interface (XCI). XCI is java-based software that uses XML to transmit
documents and data into a court. XCI has now become OXCI, for "Open XML
Court Interface," an open source software effort. OXCI is not
organizationally related to Legal XML, although most of the people in OXCI
participate in Legal XML and OXCI uses Legal XML court filing proposed
standard.
During the summer of 1998, Nick Finke was also doing important work at
the University of Cincinnati's
Center for Electronic Text in the Law. In the summer of 1998, Nick and
Todd met in Cincinnati to discuss Legal XML.
The Georgia State Legal XML developers mailing list began in November
1998 with seventeen members. Rich Himes, Nick Finke, and John Messing were
among the original members. By March 1999, membership had grown to
forty-five. Traffic on the mailing list contained many great ideas, but
there was little structure or organization. It was clear that the group
needed a charter to define its mission and scope, among other things. The
group created a draft charter and defined its scope broadly to include not
only court filings, but also pubic law (such as bills and statutes) and
private law (contracts).
By the summer of 1999, the developers list had grown to around sixty
people. By this time, active members were creating and donating markup and
stylesheets. Rolly Chambers, one of the group's few real live lawyers and
avid technologist, made significant and outstanding contributions. Other
members were not contributing, however, but were taking advantage of the
shared knowledge. It became clear that if the group's mission was to
create open, non-proprietary standards, an intellectual property policy
needed to be developed. To enforce the intellectual property policy, there
needed to be enforceable legal agreements among members. At the same time,
the volume of intellectual property being donated to the list required
some formal process for submitting, organizing, and vetting ideas. There
was also a growing need for a face-to-face meeting, administration, and
sponsorship. In short, the group needed governance and structure. It
needed legally enforceable Operating Rules.
On the political front, James Keane, an active member of the American
Bar Association and, at that time, an independent consultant, organized
the first of several "XFiles!" meetings. The March 1999 ABA Techshow
XFiles meeting was the first time that interested, high-level industry
players sat in the same room to discuss the issue of XML standards.
Competing interests and ideas were evident and there was tension as a
result, but the meeting was a huge success.
On September 15th, 1999, the first day of the National Center for State
Courts CTC6 Conference in Los Angeles, CA, John Grecean, New Mexico State
Courts and head of the Joint Technology Committee, a joint committee of
COSCA and NACM, announced JTC's intention to develop XML standards for
court filing.
Two days later, on September 17th, 1999, Legal XML held its first
face-to-face meeting. Jim McMillan, National Center for State Courts,
sponsored the meeting, which immediately followed CTC6 in Los Angeles.
DRAFT Operating Rules had been written in anticipation of the meeting. The
purpose of the first face-to-face meeting was to vet the DRAFT Operating
Rules and give technical presentations.
Attendance at the first Legal XML face-to-face meeting was
overwhelming. Forty-two (42) newcomers attended the meeting, including
John Grecean and other members of JTC. Seventeen (17) existing members
attended the meeting. Among the attendees, there were also two
representatives from the American Bar Associations' Standing Committee on
Technology and Information Systems (SCOTIS). There were also four
Australians, Allison Stanfield, Jo Sherman, Eddie O'Brien, and Chris
Priestley. (Allison Stanfield was the first female Legal XML member as
well as the first Australian Legal XML member.) Debate at the meeting was
lively. There was controversy over the DRAFT Operating Rules and its
intellectual property policy. The newcomers, especially, were not familiar
with the idea of General Public License or "copyleft." There was a cry
from government attendees that all intellectual property ought to be
released into the public domain.
Fifty new members joined the Legal XML mailing lists immediately after
the face-to-face meeting. An intense debate ensued over the Legal XML
intellectual property policy. One of the primary issues was whether the
JTC XML Court Filing effort should join with Legal XML to develop a
standard together. JTC representatives, who were primarily government
employees, were concerned about the appropriateness of retaining
intellectual property rights in the standard rather than publishing the
work into the public domain.
In October 1999, Georgia State University Research Foundation, Inc.
agreed to become the Legal XML "Intellectual Property Steward." This meant
that Legal XML was no longer simply a group of people on mailing lists,
but was backed by a legally recognized entity. This also allowed members,
for the first time, to contract with the Research Foundation and bind
themselves to the Legal XML Operating Rules and Intellectual Property
Policy. The Foundation now holds intellectual property on behalf of Legal
XML members and then licenses the intellectual property to the public
perpetually, for free under the General Public License.
On November 4th, 1999, the JTC held its first Court XML meeting in
Albuquerque, New Mexico. Sixty people attended the meeting. At that
meeting, John Greacen announced that JTC would work with Legal XML to
develop XML standards for court filing. John Greacen would lead the JTC
effort and would act at Chair of the Legal XML Court Filing workgroup.
This was a major breakthrough for Legal XML because it was the first
partnership between an existing organization with subject matter expertise
and Legal XML. At this meeting, it was also decided that there would be
several phases of the Court XML standard. In December 2000, JTC officially
decided to partner with Legal XML.
In January 2000, the Legal XML Transcripts Workgroup, headed by Davin
Fifield and Eddie O'Brien (both Australian), met in New York. Nine people
attended, including David Wacht from the National Court Reporters
Association. The Court Filing Workgroup also met in January in Phoenix,
AZ.
In early March 2000, Legal XML held its second face-to-face meeting in
Atlanta, Georgia. Forty-nine people attended the meeting. Several
workgroups met face-to-face, including Court Filing, Transcripts,
Contracts, and Public Law. Among the attendees were many of Legal XML's
workgroup chairs, including Donald Bergeron and Rolly Chambers (LEGAL),
William Jennings (HORIZONTAL), John Greacen and Robin Gibson
(COURTFILING), Mohyeddin Abdulaziz (APPEALS), Eddie O'Brien and Davin
Fifield (TRANSCRIPTS), Dan Greenwood and John McClure (CONTRACTS), Nick
Finke (PUBLICLAW), and Toby Brown (COMMUNICATIONS). At this meeting,
members decided to form an Organizing Committee that would help to
continue the development of Legal XML as an independent non-profit
organization.
On March 22nd, 2000, the Court Filing Workgroup published a first draft
of a proposed standard, authored by Marty Halvorson and Rich Himes.
On March 31st, 2000, the first Legal XML Organizing Committee meeting
took place in Chicago Illinois at the ABA Techshow. Jim Keane hosted the
meeting. Thirty-five people attended the meeting, although only
twenty-five people were invited. At the Organizing Committee meeting,
members decided to form three subworkgroups. Attendees agreed to draft and
publish recommendations on several topics by May 1st, 2000. Attendees
agreed to meet again in Los Angeles, on or around June 20th, in
conjunction with LegalTech for further face-to-face discussion.
The Court Filing Workgroup met again in May in St. Louis, MO and in
June in Dallas, TX.
The Organizing Committee met for a second time in June 2000. There was
broad consensus that Legal XML should become a non-profit organization and
charge a membership fee.
The Integrated Justice Workgroup, chaired and organized by David
Roberts, held its first meeting in June, 2000 in Dallas, TX. Approximately
twenty people attended the meeting.
In July 2000, Murk Muller hosted the first German Legal XML (Lexml.de)
face-to-face meeting in Berlin, Germany. Approximately fifteen people
attended the meeting, including Axel Horns, one of the first forty-five
Legal XML members and the first German Legal XML member. At the meeting,
members decided to partner with Legal XML in an attempt to explore the
development of language independent international standards.
Upcoming meetings include Integrated Justice, August 18, 2000, Atlanta,
GA; Lexml (Germany), September 22nd, Saarbruecken, Germany; Australia
Workgroup, October 2000, Melbourne, Australia; Court Filing Workgroup,
October 16-17, 2000, Sante Fe, NM and a full Legal XML face-to-face
meeting either in November 2000 at Massachussets Institute of Technology.
What is XML?
As the name suggests, Legal XML is focused on creating legal standards
using a technology called "XML." "XML" (eXtensible Markup Language) is a
technical standard developed by the World Wide
Web Consortium (W3C). XML is used to create "document formats" using
custom "tags" and "stylesheets." XML tags look similar to HTML (Hyptertext
Markup Language) tags. Legal XML seeks to standardize one or more sets of
legal tags (i.e., names for the underlying data), but does not seek to
standardize stylesheets (i.e., the appearance of the data).
Now and in the future, XML document formats will replace HTML as the
most favorite web technology because HTML is a "dumb" document format.
Indeed, a significant disadvantage of using HTML is that it has a
predefined set of tags that do not have a meaningful relationship to the
content within them. For instance, the following HTML "mark-up" would look
colorful in a web browser:
<FONT Color='Red">I agree to give you a peppercorn in
exchange for your services.</FONT>
However, the HTML <FONT> tag does not provide meaningful
information to a reader, a search engine, or any other information system.
More meaningful mark-up would look like this:
<CONTRACT Color='Red">I agree to give you a peppercorn
in exchange for your services.</CONTRACT>
Unfortunately, custom tags such as <CONTRACT> are not
allowed in HTML. This is where XML comes to the rescue by allowing
developers to create their own tags. The ability to customize tags makes
XML a very powerful tool.
Need for Standard "Legal" XML
The ability to create custom XML tags has great potential for
organizing and making sense of the vast quantities of information that are
being dumped onto the Internet daily. Vertical industries, such as legal,
healthcare, and banking, to name but a few, have the most to gain from a
customizable, web-based information architecture. Unfortunately, the
potential power of custom tags also has a great potential for chaos.
The reason there could be chaos is this: if several creative people
were to independently create legal tags, the likely result would be many
different tags for the same information. For example,
<CourtFiling>, <COURT_FILING>,
<filing>, are all different and incompatible tags in XML,
but they convey the same or similar meaning to a legal mind. Incompatible
tags means different software applications cannot "talk" to each
other.
The solution to this potential "Tower of Babel" is to create XML
standards for the legal industry. Accordingly, "Legal XML," the
organization, seeks to bring legal and technical minds together in one
forum to create a compatible set of open, non-proprietary, standard
tags.
Intellectual Property Policy
To assure that Legal XML standards remain open and non-proprietary
(i.e., free to the public, yet standard), the group has adopted an
intellectual property policy modeled from the intellectual property
policies of the Internet Engineering Task
Force (IETF) and the World Wide Web
Consortium. (The IETF and the W3C are the most famous and successful
Internet standards bodies. Without technical standards from these groups,
communication over the Internet would not be possible.)
The IETF, W3C, and Legal XML intellectual property policies are based
on the notion of General Public License ("GPL") or "Copyleft." Under a
GPL, an organization's members cooperatively develop intellectual property
(the standards) with other members, some of whom may be fierce
competitors. The organization retains intellectual property rights to the
jointly developed standard. Retaining intellectual property rights helps
to assure that the standard is not changed. At the same time, however, the
organization grants a perpetual license to the public to use the standard
for free. In this way, the organization's work is free and open yet
remains standard.
General Design Principles
In the first Legal XML poll, members agreed that Legal XML's mission is
not to standardize the internal format or functioning of applications
(e.g., databases, database elements). Instead, Legal XML's mission is to
standardize the interchange format that exists in between
applications. As a general rule, Legal XML will not develop
applications. However, potential applications might include a
standard XML interface, such as XCI.
To illustrate:
Application[1] ==> XML Standard ==>
Application[2]
Application[2] ==> XML Standard ==>
Application[3]
Application[3] ==> XML Standard ==>
Application[1]
Tag Names
Since Legal XML is attempting to create standards, the first
consideration faced, and decision made, by Legal XML members was on the
format of tag names. Legal XML conventions follows:
Conventions
Element names must be intuitive
Capitalize beginning of separate words
No abbreviations
Good Examples:
<CourtFiling>
<FirstName>
<Jurisdiction>
<CivilActionNumber>
Bad Examples:
<court_filing>
<firstName>
<jurisdiction>
<CivActionNum>
<civilactionnumber>
<Feild1>
Other Legal XML Efforts
Other legal XML efforts
include UELP, XCI, National Center for State Courts/Lexis, Washington
State Bar XML Study Committee, the Joint Technology Committee of COSCA and
NACM, National Conference of State Legislatures, and Legal Electronic Data
Exchange Standard (LEDES) (time and billing).
Sponsored by FindLaw and Georgia State University Electronic Court
Filing Project
Copyright © 1999, 2000, Georgia State Research
Foundation, Inc. All Rights Reserved. General
Public Licenses and Disclaimers
apply as specified in Legal
XML Operating Rules.
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