Presentation at Legal Know-how Workshop, Nov. 10, 2010

I have been invited to make a presentation on Textual information extraction and ontologies for legal case-based reasoning at a Legal Know-how Workshop, which is an industry oriented event organised by the International Society for Knowledge Management UK.
Date: 10 November 2010
Time: 13:30-19:00
Venue: University College London
Medical Sciences Building
A. V. Hill Lecture Theatre
Gower Street
London, WC1E 6BT
See the workshop website for registration fee (either free or under £25) and booking.
This will be a very interesting opportunity to hear from and talk with industry consultants and experts about the latest developments in legal knowledge management. My thanks to Stella Dextre Clarke of ISKO-UK for organising the event and inviting me to take part.

Programme

13:30 Registration
14:00 Welcome from ISKO-UK by Stella Dextre Clarke
14:05 Legal knowledge – the practitioner’s viewpoint
Melanie Farquharson, 3Kites Consulting

This session will focus on the practical situations in which lawyers look for knowledge in order to deliver legal services to their clients. It will identify some typical ‘use cases’ and consider ways in which knowledge can be delivered to the practitioner – even without them having to look for it.

14:35 Why lawyers need taxonomies – adventures in organising legal knowledge
Kathy Jacob & Lynley Barker, Pinsent Masons LLP;
Graham Barbour & Mark Fea, LexisNexis

This presentation will cover the practical issues encountered by a law firm in its quest to improve findability of one of its key resources – knowledge and information. We will discuss our approach to building taxonomies, the tools and processes deployed and how we anticipate our taxonomy will be applied and consumed by lawyers and publishers.
The LexisNexis part of the presentation will focus on the challenges of building and applying legal taxonomies to suit the breadth and depth of content they provide online. It will also examine ways in which taxonomies can be surfaced in the user interface and help to drive compelling functionality that improves the user’s search experience.

15:20 Taxonomy management at Clifford Chance
Mats Bergman, Clifford Chance

This talk will describe how taxonomy management works in practice at Clifford Chance. As an increasing number of core knowledge resources are making use of the same set of firm-wide taxonomies, the increased interdependencies necessitate the implementation of a controlled process for updating the taxonomies. A simple governance model will be presented. Some thoughts will follow on the evolution of taxonomy development within a larger organisation and the current challenge of using social tagging in conjunction with controlled vocabularies.

15:50 Refreshments (Lower Refectory)
16:20 Textual information extraction and ontologies for legal case-based reasoning
Adam Wyner, University of Liverpool

This talk gives a brief overview of current developments and prospects in two related areas of the legal semantic web for legal cases – textual information extraction and ontologies. Textual information extraction is a process of automatically annotating and extracting textual information from the legal case base (precedents), thereby identifying elements such as participants, the roles the participants play, the factors which were considered in arriving at a decision, and so on. The information is valuable not only for search (to find applicable precedents), but also to populate an ontology for legal case-based reasoning. An ontology is a formal representation of key aspects of the knowledge of legal professionals with which we can reason (e.g. given an assertion that something is a legal case, we can infer other properties) and with respect to which we can write rules (e.g. reasoning using case factors to arrive at a legal decision). Since it is expensive to manually populate an ontology (meaning to read cases and input the data into the ontology), we use textual information extraction to automatically populate the ontology. We conclude with an appeal for open source, collaborative development of legal knowledge systems among partners in academia, industry, and government.

17:00 Collaboration across boundaries
Gwenda Sippings & Gerard Bredenoord, Linklaters LLP

In this presentation, we will look at approaches to managing legal know-how in a major global law firm. We will describe several boundaries that we have to consider when organising our know-how, including boundaries between professionals, countries, internal and external resources and the well debated boundary between information and knowledge. We will also share some of the ways in which we are making our know-how available to the fee earners and other professionals in the firm, using social and technological solutions.

17:35 Reconciling the taxonomy needs of different users
Derek Sturdy, Tikit Knowledge Services

The last decade has seen the development of a substantial number of legal know-how and knowledge databases. It has also shown up a serious question on whether the metadata, and especially the taxonomies, that are applied to the various knowledge items, should be tailored to the particular needs of end-users, or whether, so to speak, "one size can fit all". In particular, this talk will discuss the overlapping, but discrete, needs of those using knowledge resources primarily for legal drafting and document production, and of those conducting legal research, and will address the relative value today, (as opposed to in 2000), of the effort put into internal metadata creation for those two sorts of end-users.

By Adam Wyner
Distributed under the Creative Commons
Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share Alike 2.0

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