Slaw linked today to The Canadian Bar Association’s recently released Guidelines for Ethical Marketing Practices Using New Information Technologies (PDF). Overall the guidelines don’t say anything extraordinary; there’s great emphasis on behaving with integrity and in accord with all other guidelines and ethical standards related to lawyer communications in general. Though the overall tone of the piece is cautionary, the CBA does encourage participation with social media as a marketing tool:

“Any risks associated with having a presence on the Internet can be managed and are outweighed by the benefits. Providing the public with information about the type of work a law firm does and the areas of work of its lawyers is an important public service as well as a business opportunity.”

There’s one bone I have to pick, though. (I’m overlooking the authors’ inclusion of MySpace in a list of sites lawyers might use. Lawyers: MySpace is a relic. Don’t waste your time on it.)

Throughout the eleven-page document, the authors refer to many kinds of online participation as “advertising.” Now, advertising can certainly play an important role in a lawyer’s or law firm’s efforts to attract new clients and online advertising works very similarly to offline advertising: ads are purchased for display in a certain location for a certain length of time. It’s a one-way form of letting people know what you do.

Participating online, however, is by definition not advertising: online participation requires two-way communication.

Sure, you could use sites like Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn just to broadcast your services. You could bombard people with messages like, “Need a lawyer? Pick me! Pick me!” But you’d be missing a tremendous opportunity, and beyond that you’d likely alienate yourself as someone who isn’t interested in engaging with people online. In the very real, very big, rapidly growing world of social media, engagement is what drives attention. (Engagement does not entail giving legal advice, the dangers of which are well outlined in the CBA’s Guidelines.)

The value of creating, growing and maintaining an online presence is in the relationships you develop with people. Real people. People who will want to know what you have to say about the law and lawyering because you make an effort to chat with them about things they want to know and because you’re an approachable expert in your area of practice.

Advertising has a very well defined place online. The rest can be called marketing, self-promotion, developing your personal brand, etc. But whatever you call it, it’s about interacting with people. And interacting goes two ways.

Martin and Zak had the pleasure of presenting to a group of lawyers at Davis LLP this afternoon; it was their first time addressing a roomful of lawyers about online communication tools and we thought we’d share the slides and notes we prepared.

In general, we focused on two major points:

• The internet is about relationships between people – something lawyers are already very good at developing
• The ways to build and maintain those relationships can feel very different online and it’s important to develop comfort with them now, when there’s room to make mistakes and learn and before it becomes an essential part of lawyering over the next five years or so

Here are the slides we used. After the jump, we’ve posted the presentation notes.

A week or so ago, Simon Fodden over at Slaw wrote a somewhat exasperated post about the generally poor state of URLs for accessing online statutes. At the end of the post he promised a part 2, in which he’d elaborate on other, more elegant ways to handle the problem.

The issue of usable URLs has been on our mind, as LexPublica must provide sane addresses for a large body of legal information that will span many languages, jurisdictions and types of content.

We think that people need three key things out of the URLs on LexPublica (and, likely, from any site that provides access to a large archive):

1. Convenience: it should be convenient to link to any document on LexPublica (including parts of that document, such as a particular section, clause or phrase).
2. Context: the URL of a LexPublica document should put it in a meaningful context. Take http://lexpubli.ca/english/canada/contract/confidentiality/simple/v1.0 as an example – a potential visitor can guess that they are dealing with a simple Canadian English-language confidentiality agreement.
3. Affordances: each part of a LexPublica URL should be an affordance – that is, a meaningful way to interact with LexPublica. People should be able explore LexPublica simply by making reasonable changes to a URL – as Ramsus^[1] puts it, “Content should be where people look for it.” URLs like http://lexpubli.ca/english/canada/contract/confidentiality/simple, http://lexpubli.ca/english/canada/contract/confidentiality, and http://lexpubli.ca/english/canada/contract should all return meaningful results. So should URLs like http://lexpubli.ca/contract or http://lexpubli.ca/confidentiality.

Convenience

The convenience issue is simple enough to solve – we can auto-generate a short, unique and stable URL for every document on the site. An auto-generated URL for a document would be a random-seeming jumble of 4 to 14 characters, perhaps like so:

http://lexpubli.ca/4pl8-n93f

A scheme like this would allow us to easily provide short URLs for billions^[2] of documents.

Addressing particular parts of a document could be accomplished through anchors and some simple, smart coding that can transform URLs like this:

http://lexpubli.ca/4pl8-n93f#s1.2.3:p1-p4

… into a reference to paragraphs 1 to 4 of section 1.2.3 of the given document. While this isn’t particularly human-readable, it makes for compact and convenient linking.

Context

Context is a tougher problem to solve, as it ventures into the hairy territory of legal information taxonomies. Putting a statute into its proper place in a hierarchy is one thing. Placing a more common piece of legal information, such as an employment agreement, is more difficult due to the sheer volume of employment agreements and the diversity of the information such an agreement might contain.

One solution is to recognize there are multiple relatively-simple taxonomies that a particular document can fit into.

For example (and without a great deal of thought on the exact URLs), the UK Transport Act of 1985 could be accessible via the following URLs:

One URL of the form /{jurisdiction}/{law-making body}/{legislation type}/{legislation name}/{year}. e.g.

http://lexpubli.ca/uk/parliament/ukpga/uk-transport-act/1985

Another URL of the form /{rfc4151 tag}. e.g.

http://lexpubli.ca/legislation.gov.uk,1985:ukpga/1985/67

Affordances

The last issue is making it so that people with different levels of legal and technical skill can easily wade through thousands of documents to find the right needle in the haystack.

While there are many parts to a solution for this issue, in the URL space we’ve adopted the view that documents should be where people look for them. This view implies that our URL system (and other parts of LexPublica that help organize information) must provide multiple ways of finding the same document. At the very least, we aim to cover the most common ways that people might seek to find a particular contract template or piece of legal information.

For example, if someone were to visit the URL http://lexpubli.ca/contract, the site should do its damnedest to provide them with a meaningful result. In this case, it might be an overview of what contracts are and how to find more contract information on LexPublica.

1. Rasmus Lerdorf, best known for inventing the PHP programming language and founding the online community around the language. [↩]
2. Some readers who’ve done the math may be thinking that 14 alphanumeric characters would give us a lot more than of billions of possible IDs. The number of possible IDs would be reduced by filtering dictionary words out of the IDs and by a few features to reduce input errors (such as optionally allowing hyphens every 4 characters) [↩]

Today we’re very excited to announce our first alpha release. It might not seem earth-shattering to you at the moment, but to us it marks a giant leap forward for LexPublica. That’s because our first small group of participants is now able to start drafting the first contract – what’s new today lays the groundwork for what’s to come. We hope the more you learn about the project the more interested you’ll be to participate, so I’ll walk you through it.

You’ll first notice that our website is now live. Zak’s been coding like mad to have the site serve two initial major functions. The drafting area is where participants will work on crafting new contracts (more on our workflow plans to come in future blog posts). The first group of participants—consisting of two lawyers, a law student and me, plus Martin and Zak—are here in Vancouver, and our collaboration will take place in the drafting area. In time, people from all over North America will collaborate via our site.

The drafting area is public, so you can watch progress happen over time, from outlining to drafting to reviewing to editing. None of the drafts is intended for use by the public, of course. After a draft has been reviewed and edited so that it’s clear, accurate and concise, it will be published on the main site, covered under a Creative Commons licence for all to use.

The second function debuting today is the issue management system. Participants will manage all tasks, comments, feature requests, questions, etc., related to the development of a contract with the issue tracker. Once a contract is released, the issue tracker will continue to be used as participants manage suggested changes and feature requests.

It’ll be a few weeks before our first contract is ready, and once it’s released we hope you’ll have a clearer idea of what our project is, how it works, and how you might want to get involved.

Want to know more? Check out our new FAQ or leave us a comment.

When I first moved to Canada from the U.S. several years ago, it was as if I’d stepped into a sort of gentle Twilight Zone: speed-limit signs looked the same but were in kilometres not miles, temperatures were reported in degrees Celsius instead of Fahrenheit, television stations played the same shows but the commercials were less flashy. I adapted quickly, but some of the things I found most confusing were phrases I encountered related to the functioning of government. It took me a while to figure out that when someone in Canada tables a motion, they’re bringing it up for discussion; in the U.S., to table a motion means not to discuss it anymore. Before I figured that out, I found most coverage of Parliament to be downright confounding.

Perhaps this might indicate to some degree the tremendous endeavour LexPublica is undertaking in having a linguistically diverse community participate in the development of common legal contracts. Not only do we have to make it as easy as possible for participants not to feel confused as they collaborate across regional and dialect lines, we have to make it easy for such a community of diverse English speakers to write plain-language contracts that are consistent with all the other contracts we produce and that are easily understood by contract users regardless of their own dialect. And let’s not forget that we want our contracts to be easily translated into other languages.

To address this meaty problem, we’re working to lay the foundation of a style guide that will evolve as LexPublica evolves. In it we’ll specify all manner of conventions: rules of punctuation and grammar, legal-language usage, how to properly insert citations when referring to cases and legislation,  guidance on the structure and layout of contracts. We’re also building what we’re calling the lexicon—a database of terminology encompassing both plain language and formal legal terms. One of the most important functions of the lexicon will be to facilitate the use of consistent terminology across contracts—it will allow us to mark a term or phrase as preferred over any synonyms it may have. We’ll also be keeping track of spelling and usage preferences.

The style guide is itself a fairly massive project; eventually we hope a community of word nerds, grammar fiends, legal linguists, prescriptivists, descriptivists, and average folk will grow up around it just as communities will grow up around contract topics. If you think you’d be interested in helping out with the style guide, speak up and I’ll keep you posted as the project develops.