Tutorials

Two tutorials will be offered on Monday afternoon, June 4:

  1. Advanced Legal Technology in Practice: An Overview, Marc Lauritsen, President of Capstone Practice Systems
  2. Enhanced Dispute Resolution Through the Use of Information Technology, Prof. John Zeleznikow, Victoria University, Melbourne, Australia

Further information is below.

Advanced Legal Technology in Practice: An Overview

Instructor: Marc Lauritsen, President of Capstone Practice Systems

The technology of law has become a vast field, with growing implications for lawyers, clients, and IT professionals. This tutorial will survey the contemporary world of legal knowledge tools, covering illustrative high-end practice environments, self-help systems, and commoditized services. We'll pay special attention to advanced drafting software, with concrete examples. We'll also touch on ethical, intellectual property, and other substantive legal issues along the way.Instructor: Marc Lauritsen, president of Capstone Practice Systems, is a lawyer and educator with over twenty years of pioneering leadership in advanced legal software. (Here's a recent interview.)

Marc earned two degrees from MIT and the J.D. from Harvard Law School. After practicing and supervising in legal aid offices, he returned to Harvard as a fieldwork instructor, director of clinical programs, and a senior research associate. He directed Project PERICLES, Harvard's first major research program in law and computers. He became a principal of The Capstone Group in 1992, and founded Capstone Practice Systems in 1998. In 2000-2001 Marc was vice president for practice technology at AmeriCounsel.com, an internet legal services company.

Capstone builds systems for some of the top law firms and departments in the world, but is also energetically involved in pathbreaking projects on behalf of nonprofit legal organizations, such as "National Public ADO" (Automated Documents Online), which delivers smart forms for free to low-income people and their advocates.

Marc has lectured widely and published over a hundred articles on the uses and implications of information technology in the legal profession. He is on the editorial boards of Artificial Intelligence and Law and the International Journal of Law and Information Technology. He has trained hundreds of lawyers in the development and use of knowledge-based systems.

Marc co-originated the international SubTech conferences that began at Salzburg in 1990 and that continue to draw law school thought leaders every two years for rich exchanges about the technology of law. He's been a director of the International Association for Artificial Intelligence and Law and co-chairs the American Bar Association's e-lawyering task force.

Enhanced Dispute Resolution Through the Use of Information Technology

Instructor: Prof. John Zeleznikow, Victoria University, Melbourne, Australia.

N.B. While Dr. Arno Lodder (also listed below as an instructor) has been involved in the preparation of the tutorial presentation, he will not be available to personally deliver the tutorial.

The objectives of the tutorial are (a) to examine how to cope with the rapidly escalating number of disputes, both offline and on the Internet; (b) to introduce dispute resolution fundamentals; and (c) to indicate how information technology can provide decision support for resolving disputes. No formal knowledge is prerequisite.

Time allocation for the major course topics:

  • Introduction - Fundamentals of dispute resolution. How IT can support dispute resolution, enhancing access to justice and e-government. (15 minutes)
  • Dispute resolution mechanisms (15 minutes)
  • Barriers to the adoption of ADR, ODR, and Information Technology in Negotiation (15 minutes)
  • Managing negotiation knowledge (30 minutes)
  • The use of Information Technology for supporting dispute resolution (30 minutes)
  • Examples of intelligent negotiation decision support (30 minutes)
  • The Lodder and Zeleznikow Model for Online Dispute Resolution (30 minutes)
  • Conclusion (15 minutes)

Biography of the instructors. Arno R. Lodder is an associate professor at the Computer/Law Institute of the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, and is Director of the Centre for Electronic Dispute Resolution (CEDIRE.org), an international research platform concentrating on legal and technical aspects of electronic dispute resolution. His research interests lie both in AI and Law (in particular legal argumentation), and IT Law (E-commerce), and at the intersection of both fields: Online Dispute Resolution. He is the author/editor of numerous articles (e.g. Harvard Negotiation Law Review 2005), special journal issues (e.g. Virtualization in Dispute Resolution, Information & Communications Technology Law, 15(2) 2006), and over 10 books in the last 5 years, e.g. on spam (2004, in Dutch), on e-signatures (2005, in Dutch), IT and Lawyers (2006), IT Law - The Global Future: Achievements, Plans and Ambitions (2006) Legal aspects of virtual worlds/MMORPGs (2006, in Dutch). He has co-organized four international workshops (2003-2007) on Online Dispute Resolution (http://odrworkshop.info). He is the book review editor of Artificial Intelligence & Law, treasurer of the foundation of knowledge systems JURIX, member of the Board of the Dutch IT & Law association (NvvIR), and a member of the UN expert committee on ODR. Recent research includes various aspects of Electronic Dispute resolution such as E-signatures in criminal proceedings (2006, for Ministry of Justice) and the BEST-project : "Using Semantic Web technology to develop a system that helps litigants in determining BATNAs in damages disputes (2005-2008)"

John Zeleznikow is a full professor of Information systems at Victoria University in Melbourne, Australia. He has conducted research and taught in Australia, France, Israel, Netherlands, United Kingdom and USA. He has written two books (for Kluwer and Springer) on IT and Law, supervised 19 PHD students, received over $US 5 million in research grants and published over 150 refereed articles. His major research interests are in Knowledge Discovery, Managing negotiation knowledge and Legal Decision Support. Professor Zeleznikow was the general chairman of both the sixth and ninth International Conferences on Artificial Intelligence and Law. He currently leads a research team of ten people working on constructing negotiation support systems.

Professor Zeleznikow's Family_Winner system recently won an ABC TV (Australia) award on the New Inventors show. In 2005, his research was featured in the Economist, Boston Globe, Times of London and BBC radio as well as numerous Australian TV, radio and newspaper outlets.

In 2005, Dr Lodder and Professor Zeleznikow published "Developing an Online Dispute Resolution Environment: Dialogue Tools and Negotiation Systems in a Three Step Model", The Harvard Negotiation Law Review. Vol. 10:287-338.

Professor Zeleznikow gave an earlier version of this tutorial at the LawTech06 conference held at MIT, Cambridge, MA in October 2006. In March 2007, he gave a series of lectures and workshops on using Information Technology to enhance access to justice, at the invitation of the New Zealand Ministry of Justice.