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The Swedish legal publisher Notisum AB has been on the Swedish market for online legal publishing since 1996.  Our Internet-based law book at www.notisum.se is read by more than 50,000 persons per week and our customers range from municipalities and government institutions to Swedish multinationals.

Now we are heading for China, and I would like to share with you some practical experiences from this highly dynamic market and our challenges in trying to conquer it.

The case for a legal monitoring tool, codenamed “EnviTool”

In close co-operation with our customers, we had developed a set of specialized Internet based tools  in Sweden for supporting the process of legal compliance and legal information sharing within big organizations. The key driver of these needs was the growing number of certificates according to the international environmental management standard ISO 14001:2004.

ISO 14001 is a worldwide industry standard to help companies to improve their environmental performance through the implementation of an environmental management system. There is much to say about management systems. Continuous improvement is the heart of the matter–it is all about doing the right things right. Establish a plan, do what you planned, check your results and then start all over by correcting your plans. Plan, Do, Check, Act.

According to the standard, you have to identify the relevant environmental legislation for your organization. You need access to those laws and regulations, and you have to keep an updated list. You should also make the information available to the people of your organization.

By providing an online legal register, monitored for changes, with a whole set of information sharing and workflow features, Notisum helps the certified companies to comply with the environmental legislation.

We developed this system step by step.  When it came to going outside the borders of the Kingdom of Sweden, we changed the name from Rättsnätet+Miljö to EnviTool.

The case for China

Sweden is a country of very high penetration of the ISO 14001 standard, and the use of the standard is in a mature phase in most organizations. China, on the other hand, is number one in the world, with more than 70,000 certificates issued. The growth is double-digit. So China is the place to be if you have products for this specific customer group. The users of the standard are yet immature in China, so we knew there were some challenges out there.

The market for legal information tools is overall immature in China and legal compliance is not always on top of the manager’s priority lists. However, Notisum took the first steps, starting in 2009, to take on the challenge to make China our second home market. Many challenges, expected and unexpected, were waiting for EnviTool.

Step one – the product

Like many commercial ventures, the EnviTool project was the result of a randomly started chain of events. Our Swedish CEO was playing golf with a professor at KTH, the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm.  The professor was in charge of a student exchange program between National University of Singapore (NUS) and KTH. We were asked to host an internship for an ambitious computer science student in our company for one academic year.

The internship was successful, our student was doing a great job and we learned a lot about Asia and the Chinese culture. We have now hosted three excellent NUS students from Singapore, all good representatives of their university and their country.  And all of them bilingual English and Chinese. That’s when we decided that China would be an interesting market to try. And yes – China is far away from Sweden, it is terribly big and it was really too large a challenge for our company. We wanted to try anyway, with the hope that Singapore could be the bridge for us.

We decided to start a subsidiary in Singapore and so we did. It is easy, by the way. According to the World Bank, Singapore ranks number one in the world in ease of doing business. Coming from Sweden, ranked number 50 in the world in terms of how easily you pay your taxes, I had an almost religious moment when we got a letter of gratitude from the Singaporean tax authorities after paying our taxes. Not so in Sweden, I may add…

With the first NUS intern now as our first employee, we started translating and adapting our internet tool together with our development manager in Sweden. The technological challenges were there, of course. We base our technology on the Microsoft.NET platform, but the support for the simplified Chinese character set was not totally implemented everywhere.  Multi-language support was developed, and plenty were the occasions in the beginning when Swedish words popped up unexpectedly. The search function in Chinese is different in EnviTool and the relations between the legislative documents were so different from the Swedish and European law that we had to re-design our database structure.

Step two – the market research

With good help from the Swedish Trade Council in China, we did market research to see if there could be a similar market in China and if our business model could work.

After three journeys and two projects together with the trade council, we decided to give it a try. The EnviTool China project was about to take off. Learning to eat properly with chopsticks was part of the experience. Learning to appreciate the Chinese food was easier although there are some zoological challenges there too, outside the scope of this blog entry.

At this point in time we also employed a Chinese/Swedish project manager with extensive knowledge and experience in the field.

Step three – the content

Translating the tool to Chinese and English was the easy part. When it came to the content, we had to throw out everything from Sweden and put in Chinese legislation and comments. We soon found interesting challenges.

Our first experience of the Chinese legal tradition,which is in many ways different from where we come from, was the search for a standard for citations. In the Swedish databases we had successfully used computer software to automatically find citations, law titles, cross references and other document data.  It became clear to us that there were no shortcuts in the Chinese material. We had to input all data manually.

We decided to restrict the information to cover relevant legislation in the EHS (Environmental, Health & Safety) and CSR (Corporate Social Responsibility) field and to concentrate on the national level with some provincial/municipal areas like Beijing and Shanghai. The EHS/CSR users are professionals in their field of work and their industries. They are not lawyers and not very used to legal information systems. EnviTool were developed with EHS/CSR managers in our minds. We wrote the editorial content to suit the needs of our target audience.

We realized that we needed a partner in China to provide fast and timely information. In ChinaLawInfo, established by Peking University in association with the university’s Legal Information Center, we found a great partner. They are the most important legal information provider in China and we saw that Notisum of Sweden and ChinaLawInfo had many similarities in experience and way of working. Yes, we are small and they are big, but that goes for Sweden and China all over. So  EnviTool now provides the EHS/CSR laws and regulations from both ChinaLawInfo and government sources. We also have an on-going editorial co-operation in Beijing.

By now we also had good content. The EnviTool Internet service and database, provided from our Singapore company servers, were released in its first version in the fall of 2010.

Step four – market introduction

If company start-up was a short track in Singapore, it was a longer journey in the world’s second biggest economy. After having tried 50 other names, Envitool finally was translated to 安纬同 in Chinese and we got the business permit in August 2011.

We employed the people we needed and found a partner to help us with HR and finance issues.  Since then we have started our sales and marketing activities, moving slowly forward. The use of legal information tools served from Singapore is combined with management consulting from our team in Shanghai. We provide training in using the tool and can assist the clients in finding the laws and regulations relevant to their operation.

The second generation of the site is up and running at www.envitool.com and we are proud to have customers from China, the US, Japan and four different European countries.

What we have learned and what we think of the future

To get to know China and the Chinese people is of course one part of the fun. Being a European, you make many mistakes, sometimes because of language, sometimes cultural.

One example of this confusion was when I intervened in the editorial process. In EnviTool we provide bi-lingual Chinese/English short and long comments to laws and regulations. In the Swedish service, which I am more familiar with, the short comment is rendered in italics with the longer comment below in plain text. In the English version of the comments in EnviTool, the short one was not in italics. I complained and our programmer quickly changed this. Shortly thereafter, at a customer meeting, I showed the comments, now in Chinese language version. (I don’t understand a word of Chinese.)  Can you imagine Chinese characters in italics? I can tell you, it makes no sense and it looks bad. That was the language mistake. The cultural mistake was managerial. A Swedish employee would have told me how stupid I were, if I came up with such a bad idea. The Asian employee (highly intelligent and highly educated) probably saw the problem and maybe thought “the boss is more stupid than usual, but he is my boss so I have better do what he tells me!”. A lot to learn, many aspects to consider.

To conclude, the start-up was a bit slow because of the red tape but so far, our government contacts have been smooth. We have felt very welcome at the Chinese authorities like the Ministry of Environmental Protection and local governments. In the end, our goals are similar: better environmental and occupational health & safety legal compliance – better environment and better life for the citizens.

We know it will take a long time for us to get the knowledge and experience needed to be a significant player in the Chinese market, and we are prepared to stay there and step by step build our presence.  It took many years to build a loyal and substantial customer base in Sweden. It will take even longer in China.

 

Magnus Svernlöv is the founder and chairman of the Swedish online legal publisher Notisum (www.notisum.se) and its Chinese subsidiary Envitool (www.envitool.cn). He holds an MBA from INSEAD, France, a MScEE degree from Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden and a BA from the School of Business, Ecnomics and Law, University of Gothenburg, Sweden. He welcomes any comment or feedback to ms@notisum.se

VoxPopuLII is edited by Judith Pratt. Editors-in-Chief are Stephanie Davidson and Christine Kirchberger, to whom queries should be directed. The information above should not be considered legal advice. If you require legal representation, please consult a lawyer.

 

“To be blunt, there is just too much stuff.” (Robert C. Berring, 1994 [1])

Law is an information profession where legal professionals take on the role of intermediaries towards their clients. Today, those legal professionals routinely use online legal research services like Westlaw and LexisNexis to gain electronic access to legislative, judicial and scholarly legal documents.

Put simply, legal service providers make legal documents available online and enable users to search these text collections in order to find documents relevant to their information needs. For quite some time the main focus of providers has been the addition of more and more documents to their online collections. Quite contrary to other areas, like Web search, where an increase in the number of available documents has been accompanied by major changes in the search technology employed, the search systems used in online legal research services have changed little since the early days of computer-assisted legal research (CALR).

It is my belief, however, that the search technology employed in CALR systems will have to dramatically change in the next years. The future of online legal research services will more and more depend on the systems’ ability to create useful result lists to users’ queries. The continuing need to make additional texts available will only speed up the change. Electronic availability of a sufficient number of potentially relevant texts is no longer the main issue; quick findability of a few highly relevant documents among hundreds or even thousands of other potentially relevant ones is.

To reach that goal, from a search system’s perspective, relevance ranking is key. In a constantly growing number of situations – just like Professor Berring already stated almost 20 years ago (see above ) – even carefully chosen keywords bring back “too much stuff”.  Successful ranking, that is the ordering of search results according to their estimated relevance, becomes the main issue. A system’s ability to correctly assess the relevance of texts for every single individual user, and for every single of their queries will quickly become – or has arguably already become in most cases – the next holy grail of computer-assisted legal research.

Until a few years back providers could still successfully argue that search systems should not be blamed for the lack of  “theoretically, maybe, sometimes feasible” relevance-ranking capabilities, but rather that users had to be blamed for their missing search skills. I do not often hear that line of argumentation any longer, which certainly does not have to do with any improvement of (Boolean) search skills of end users. Representatives of service providers do not dare to follow that line of argumentation any longer, I think, because every single day every one of them uses Google by punching in vague, short queries and still mostly gets back sufficiently relevant top results. Why should this not work in CALR systems?

Indeed. Why, one might ask, is there not more Web search technology in contemporary computer-assisted legal research? Sure, according to another often-stressed argument of system providers, computer-assisted legal research is certainly different from Web search. In Web search we typically do not care about low recall as long as this guarantees high precision, while in CALR trading off recall for precision is problematic. But even with those clear differences, I have, for example, not heard a single plausible argument why the cornerstone of modern Web search, link analysis, should not be successfully used in every single CALR system out there.

These statements certainly are blunt and provocative generalizations. Erich Schweighofer, for example, has already even shown in 1999 (pre-mainstream-Web),  that there had in fact been technological changes in legal information retrieval in his well-named piece “The Revolution in Legal Information Retrieval or: The Empire Strikes Back”. And there have also been free CALR systems like PreCYdent that have fully employed citation-analysis techniques in computer-assisted legal research and have thereby – even if they did not manage to stay profitable – shown “one of the most innovative SE [search engine] algorithms“, according to experts.

An exhaustive and objective discussion of the various factors that contribute to the slow technological change in computer-assisted legal research can certainly neither be offered by myself alone nor in this short post. For a whole mix of reasons, there is not (yet) more “Google” in CALR, including the fear of system providers to be held liable for query modifications which might (theoretically) lead to wrong expert advice, and the lack of pressure from potential and existing customers to use more modern search technology.

What I want to highlight, however, is one more general explanation which is seldom put forward explicitly. What slows down technological innovation in online legal research, in my opinion, is also the interest of the whole legal profession to hold on to a conception of “legal relevance” that is immune to any kind of computer algorithm. A successfully employed, Web search-like ranking algorithm in CALR would after all not only produce comfortable, highly relevant search results, but would also reveal certain truths about legal research: The search for documents of high “legal relevance” to a specific factual or legal situation is, in most cases, a process which follows clear rules. Many legal research routines follow clear and pre-defined patterns which could be translated into algorithms. The legal profession will have to accept that truth at some point, and will therefore have to define and communicate “legal relevance” much less mystically and more pragmatically.

Again, also at this point, one might ask “Why?” I am certain that if the legal profession, that is legal professionals and their CALR service providers, do not include up-to-date search technology in their CALR systems, someone else will at some point do so without the need for a lot of involvement of legal professionals. To be blunt, at this point, Google can still serve as an example for our systems, at some point soon it might simply set an example instead of our systems.

Anton GeistAnton Geist is Law Librarian at WU (Vienna University of Economics and Business) University Library. He law degrees from University of Vienna (2006) and University of  Edinburgh (2010). He is grateful for feedback and discussions and can be contacted at home@antongeist.com.

[1] Berring, Robert C. (1994), Collapse of the Structure of the Legal Research Universe: The Imperative of Digital Information, 69 Wash. L. Rev. 9.

VoxPopuLII is edited by Judith Pratt. Editors-in-Chief are Stephanie Davidson and Christine Kirchberger, to whom queries should be directed. The information above should not be considered legal advice. If you require legal representation, please consult a lawyer.

[Editor’s Note] For topic-related VoxPopuLII posts please see: Núria Casellas, Semantic Enhancement of legal information … Are we up for the challenge?; Marcie Baranich, HeinOnline Takes a New Approach to Legal Research With Subject Specific Research Platforms; Elisabetta Fersini, The JUMAS Experience: Extracting Knowledge From Judicial Multimedia Digital Libraries; João Lima, et.al, LexML Brazil Project; Joe Carmel, LegisLink.Org: Simplified Human-Readable URLs for Legislative Citations; Robert Richards, Context and Legal Informatics Research; John Sheridan, Legislation.gov.uk

Law BooksQuestion: Is there a good reason why judges should not be blogging their opinions?

Follow my thinking here.

I, like many librarians, love books. By that I mean I love physical books. I love the feel of paper in my hand. I love the smell of books. When I attended library school, there was no doubt in my mind that I would work in a place surrounded by shelf after shelf of beautiful books. I was confident that I would be able to transfer that love of books to a new generation.

That’s not how things turned out. Without recounting exactly how I got here, I should say that I am a technology librarian, and have been since even before I graduated library school. Technology is where I found my calling, and where libraries seem to need the most help. As I delve deeper into the world of library technology, particularly in the academic setting, I am increasingly forced to confront an uncomfortable reality: Print formats are inferior to electronic. And in some of my darker moments, I may even go so far as to echo the comments of Jeff Jarvis in his book “What Would Google Do” when he writes: “print sucks.”

On page 71, talking about the burden of physical “stuff,” Jarvis writes:

“It’s expensive to produce content for print, expensive to manufacture, and expensive to deliver. Print limits your space and your ability to give readers all they want. It restricts your timing and the ability to keep readers up-to-the-minute. Print is already stale when it’s fresh. It is one-size-fits-all and can’t be adapted to the needs of each customer. It comes with no ability to click for more. It can’t be searched or forwarded. It has no archive. It kills trees. It uses energy. And you really should recycle it, though that’s just a pain. Print sucks. Stuff sucks.”

In this paragraph, Jarvis may as well have been talking about the current state of online legal information. Although we may not have figured out the magic bullets of authenticity and preservation, the fact remains that print is a burden. In many cases, it is a burden to our governments, and our libraries.

There are good reasons to proceed cautiously towards online legal information. However, the most significant barriers to accepting new modes of publishing official legal information online, like judges’ blogging opinions, may be cultural and political. In the end, law librarians and other legal professionals can’t allow our own nostalgia and habit to stand in the way of changes that can, should, and must happen.

AALL Working Groups

As many readers may know, the American Association of Law Libraries (AALL) began forming state working groups earlier this year. The purpose of those working groups was to “help AALL ensure access to electronic legal information in your state.” This is certainly a worthwhile goal, and one I obviously support. But the PDF document online, calling for formation of these working groups, sends a mixed message.

The very first duty of each working group is to “take action to oppose any plan in your state to eliminate an official print legal resource in favor of online-only unless the electronic version is digitally authenticated and will be preserved for permanent public access, or to charge fees to access legal information electronically. This is an increasingly common problem as states respond to severe budget cuts.”

Perhaps it’s just the phrasing of the document that bothered me. Rather than even providing guidance to states planning to eliminate print legal resources, AALL has set as its default position the opposition to any such plan.

In fairness, I note that the document hints that online-only legal resources might be acceptable if states don’t charge for them, or if such resources meet the rather complex standards laid out in the Association of Reporters of Judicial Decisions’ Statement of Principles.

The Association of Reporters of Judicial Decisions (ARJD) published Statement of Principles: “Official” On-Line Documents in February 2007, revised in May 2008. Most tellingly, in Principle 3 of the Statement they write: “Print publication, because of its reliability, is the preferred medium for government documents at present.”

Later in the document we find out why print is so reliable. Talking about electronic versions, the ARJD says they should not be considered official unless they are “permanent in that they are impervious to corruption by natural disaster, technological obsolescence, and similar factors and their digitized form can be readily translated into each successive electronic medium used to publish them.”

Without question, electronic material must be able to survive a natural disaster. The practice of storing information on a single server or keeping all backups in the same facility could be problematic. But emerging trends and best practices could help safeguard against these problems. In addition, programs like LOCKSS (Lots of Copies Keep Stuff Safe) can help alleviate some of these concerns by making sure many copies of each digital item exist at multiple geographic locations.

Also, digital format obsolescence has largely been overstated. PDF documents are not going anywhere anytime soon. Even conservative estimates establish PDF as a reliable format for the foreseeable future.

HTML may be no different. Consider that the very first Web document, Links and Anchors, is almost valid HTML5. Nearly 20 years later, that document is compatible with modern Web browsers.

BookOn the other side of the equation, is print impervious to natural disaster, or even technological obsolescence? Of course not. At Yale, with our rare books library and large historical collection, I have witnessed first hand the damage time can do to a physical book. Even more importantly, books in the last hundred years have been published so cheaply they may fall apart even sooner than books published centuries ago.

Print and Electronic Costs

The reality is that moving to online-only legal information is a good thing for everyone involved in producing and consuming such information. The burden of print is not limited to the costs forced upon states that produce it; that burden is also borne by libraries and citizens who consume it.

As mentioned above respecting the AALL working group document, many states are already looking at going online-only to cut costs, and why shouldn’t they? With current budget situations across the country being what they are, printing costs being particularly high, and electronic publishing costs being so low, of course states are looking at saving money by ending needless printing.

But libraries would also benefit from the cost savings of governments’ moving to electronic formats. Not only do libraries currently have to subsidize printing costs by paying for the “official” print copies of legal materials; libraries also have to pay for the shelf space, as well as manpower to process incoming material and place it on the shelf, and may also have to pay additional costs for preserving the physical material. Not to mention the fact that we may pay for additional services that furnish access to the exact same material in an electronic format.

The costs involved in dealing with print legal resources are well known to most librarians. So why aren’t we clamoring for governments to publish online-only legal information?

Officialness, Authenticity, Preservation, and Citeability

Of course there are genuine concerns about online-only legal information. The big sticking points seem to be (in no particular order) officialness, authenticity, preservation, and citeability. Each issue is worthy of, and has been the subject of, much discussion.

Officiality may be in some ways the easiest and most difficult hurdle for online-only legal information to leap. To make an online version of legal material official, an appropriate authoritative body need only declare that version “official.” The task seems simple enough.

The more difficult part may be political. With organizations like AALL and ARJD currently opposing online-only options, that action may be politically difficult. Persuading lawyers, judges, and legislatures to approve such a declaration could be even more difficult. Can you imagine a bill, regulation, or some other action making a blog the “official” outlet for a particular court’s opinions?

The question of authenticity is more difficult to deal with from a technological perspective, although there has been interesting work done with respect to PDFs, electronic signatures, and public and private keys. The Government Printing Office (GPO) has done a great job leading the way in the area of authenticity: http://www.gpoaccess.gov/authentication/. The new Legislation.gov.uk site unveiled recently has taken a different approach from the GPO’s. As John Sheridan has written in an earlier post, at the moment The U.K. National Archives are not taking any steps towards authenticating the information on the Legislation.gov.uk site, but they recognize the need to address the issue at some point. John Joergensen at Rutgers-Camden has taken yet another approach. And Claire Germain, in a recent paper about authentication practices respecting international legal information (pdf), states that those practices vary throughout the world. Thus the prickly question of authenticating online legal information is an issue that’s not going away any time soon.

AALL and ARJD have made a big deal about preservation of online legal information, an issue that’s important for librarians, too. Unfortunately, this is another area where no good answer exists to guide us. As Sarah Rhodes wrote earlier this year, “our current digital preservation strategies and systems are imperfect – and they most likely will never be perfected.”

The Library of Congress National Digital Information Infrastructure & Preservation Program (NDIIPP) has some helpful resources. The Legal Information Preservation Alliance (LIPA) also provides some good guidance in this area. However, many librarians are still reluctant to accept that digital preservation practices may enable us to end our reliance on print.

A similar reluctance can be seen in resistance to the Durham Statement, which — though directed at law reviews — also says something about other kinds of online legal information. Most notably, Margaret Leary of the University of Michigan chose not to sign the Durham Statement, and discussed her decision to continue to rely on print at a recent AALL program. In a listserv posting quoted in Richard Danner’s recent paper, Ms. Leary asserted: “I do not agree with the call to stop publishing in print, nor do I think we have now or will have in the foreseeable future the requisite ‘stable, open, digital formats’.” Similarly, Richard Leiter explains that he signed the Durham Statement with an asterisk because of the statement’s call for an end to the printing of law reviews.

What constitutes ‘stable, open, digital formats’ for the purposes of satisfying some librarians is unclear. As I mentioned earlier, a number of digital formats currently fit this description. This makes me think that there’s something else going on here, a resistance to abandoning print for other reasons.

Citeability also becomes an issue as print legal information disappears. If there is no print reporter volume in which an opinion is issued, then how would one cite to an opinion (setting aside for a moment Lexis and Westlaw citations)?

However, efforts towards implementing “medium-neutral legal citation formats” have already been made. According to Ivan Mokanov’s recent VoxPopuLII post, most citations in Canada are of a neutral format. In the United States, LegisLink.org has made an effort to improve online citations, as Joe Carmel describes in his recent post. Work on URN:LEX and other standards has resulted in some progress towards dealing with the citeability issue. Organizations like the AALL Electronic Legal Information Access & Citation Committee also deserve credit for taking this on. [Editor’s Note: Those organizations have produced universal citation standards — such as the AALL Universal Citation Guide — which have been adopted by a number of U.S. jurisdictions.] Even The Bluebook supports alternative citation formats. For example, rule 10.3.3, “Public Domain Format,” specifies how to cite to a public domain or “medium-neutral format.” The Bluebook even goes so far as to allow citation in a jurisdiction’s specified format.

But despite all this work, nothing has yet stuck.

The Next Step

One thing you’ll notice respecting all of these issues is that they are currently unsettled. While AALL and ARJD have both suggested that they would look favorably on online-only legal information if it were official, authenticated, and preserved (they do not mention citeability), there is no indication of when we will reach a level of achievement on these issues that would be satisfactory to these organizations. Can governments, libraries, and citizens afford to wait?

Asking states to continue to bear the burden of publishing material in print as they run out of funding, and libraries to bear the expense of preserving that print, is irresponsible. While we might not have all of the answers now, we certainly have enough to move forward in an intelligent manner.

The National Conference of Commissioners on Uniform State Laws (NCCUSL) has been working on an Authentication and Preservation of State Electronic Legal Materials Act. [Editor’s Note: The Chair of the Act’s Drafting Committee is Michele L. Timmons, the Revisor of Statutes for the State of Minnesota, and its Reporter is Professor Barbara Bintliff of the University of Texas School of Law.] According to the Study Committee’s Report and Recommendations for the Act’s Drafting Committee, the goal of the draft should be to “describ[e] minimum standards for the authentication and preservation of online state legal materials.” This seems like an appropriate place to start.

Rather than setting unrealistic or vague expectations, the minimum standards provided by the draft act seem to allow some flexibility for how states could address some of these issues. As opposed to working towards a “stable and open digital format,” which seems more a moving target than an attainable goal, the draft act sets forth an outline for how states can get started with publishing official and authentic online-only legal information. While far from finished, the draft act appears to be a step in the right direction.

What Is the Real Issue?

I think the real sticking point on this matter is mental or emotional. It comes from an uneasiness about how to deal with new methods of publishing legal information. For hundreds of years, legal information has been based in print. Even information available on the Lexis and Westlaw online services has its roots in print, if not full print versions of the same material. It’s as if the lack of a print or print-like version will cause librarians to lose the compass that helps us navigate the complex legal information landscape.

Of course, publishing legal information electronically brings its own challenges and costs for libraries. Electronic memory and space are not free, and setting up the IT infrastructure to consume, make available, and preserve digital materials can be costly. But in the long run, dealing with electronic material can and will be much easier and less costly for all involved, as well as giving greater access to legal information to the citizens who need it.

So Judges Blogging?Gavel

Question: Is there a good reason why judges should not be blogging their opinions?

Although he was the co-chair of the ARJD committee that produced the Statement of Principles, even Frank Wagner, the outgoing U.S. Supreme Court reporter of decisions, acknowledges that “budgetary constraints may eventually force most governmental units to abandon the printed word in favor of publishing their official materials exclusively online.” He also recognizes that the GPO’s work in this area may put an end to the printed U.S. Reports sooner than other “official publications.”

So were an appropriate authority to make them official, and some form of authentication were decided on, and methods of preservation and citation had been taken into account, would you feel comfortable with judges’ blogging their opinions?

We have to get over our unease with new formats for publishing online legal information. We have to stop handcuffing governments and libraries by placing unrealistic and unattainable expectations on them for publishing online legal information. We have to prepare ourselves for a world where online is the only outlet for official legal information.

I still enjoy taking a book off the shelf and reading. I enjoy flipping through and browsing the pages. But nostalgia and habit are not valid strategies for libraries of the future.

jason_eisemanJason Eiseman is the Librarian for Emerging Technologies at Yale Law School. He has experience in academic and law firm libraries working with intranets, websites, and technology training.

VoxPopuLII is edited by Judith Pratt. Editor in chief is Robert Richards.