Paperless Law and Paperless Legal Practice. Learning from the bean

counters.#reinventlaw Silicon Valley 2013

Sean McGrath, CTO

http://www.propylon.com@propylonsean

sean.mcgrath@propylon.com

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Propylon Overview #1/3

Legal and Regulatory Products & Services Company

Founded 2001. Approx 70 staff (Lawrence, KS + Dublin, Ireland)

LWB - end-to-end IT Systems for Legislatures and Parliaments:

– Legislatures of Ohio, Indiana, Kansas, North Dakota

– Parliaments of Ireland, Wales and Northern Ireland

– +2 in 2013

Propylon Overview #2/3

TimeArc - Governance, Risk, Compliance: Point-in-time Legal & Regulatory

solutions Target Markets:

• Legal Research, litigation support• Operational and strategic insight

• Auditors/Corporate Counsel Chief Risk Officers Governors, Legislators, Chiefs of

Staff, state/federal agency heads

Propylon Overview #3/3

ActiveArc: OAIS Compliant Digital Records Management for Digital Authenticity of “born digital” assets such as laws, regulations, ordinances etc.

UELMA - Uniform Law Commission Model Law

“Big Data” Analytics for policy formation and operational efficiency

KEEP - Kansas Electronic Enterprise Preservation

Sean McGrath - Background

Trinity College Computer Science, 1987 Co-founder of Propylon 25+ years of Legal and Regulatory IT

experience Consulted for ThomsonWest, LexisNexis,

United Nations, UK Parliament, Irish Government...

SGML maven/advocate since 1986 W3C Invited Expert to XML Working Group 3 books on markup languages for Prentice Hall

(Dr. Charles F. Goldfarb Series on Open Information Management)

Common technology thread

Corpus-wide point-in-time model for digital data

Time is key to authenticity, analytics and paperless-ness and key to 21st Century Legal Content Management

Some key concepts we need to adopt from the world of accounting into the world of law

Ledgers and Audit Trail Roll-up reporting as auto-generated

outputs P+L is a report. What is a Statute?

LWB - Legislation Amendment

LWB Auto Generated Outputs

TimeArc Example

TimeArc

TimeArc

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TimeArc

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TimeArc

TimeArc

Ledgers - Luca Pacioli

Audit Trails

Audit Trail -> Provenance -> Authenticity

Audit Trail -> History -> Regression Models/Prediction

Audit Trail -> Confidence -> Paperless-ness

Big Data -> Temporal Data

It is economically silly to throw “old” digital stuff away - we are throwing out both the provenance and the insight and perpetuating paper

Relational Data Model considered bad

We need to revisit the concept of a “backup” in the age of cloud/big data

21st Century Legal Corpora

Corpus-based not document-based content architectures

not relational not document-by-document versioning

Contemporaneous hyper-linking/cites Tamper evident provenance via corpus audit

trails Truly permanent URLs Distributed time-based corpora “nodes”

21st Century Legal Corpora

Web Native Media Neutral Point-In-Time Access Audit-Trail/Provenance-based Distributed based on time-ware nodes Truly permanent URLs

Pacioli's ledgers concept holds the key.