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 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 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.

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.

As Martin and I have gone from planning to doing, we’ve been pleasantly surprised by how many people have wanted to help us get LexPublica up and running.

One of our most pleasant surprises has been Kim Werker, a polymath friend of mine from the craft, publishing and media industries. Friendly chats about what Kim and I were each up to led her to take a keen interest in LexPublica and to dive into a very hands-on role getting it up and running.

Kim has a broad range of skills that she will be using in many separate areas, from copywriting LexPublica’s introductory materials and bolstering our anemic web presence to tackling the more formidable task of leading work on the LexPublica Style Guide.

You’ll hear from her directly as she starts to blog and tweet about the Style Guide and other topics. She’s looking forward to getting to know our new and growing community, so don’t hesitate to introduce yourself.

When we first introduce people to the idea of LexPublica, a common assumption is that we’ll be like Wikipedia.

It’s not a bad assumption. Wikipedia has been phenomenally successful and we could do worse than to emulate them.

The challenge we’d face with trying to be like Wikipedia is that they use a “release, then review” content creation process.

The “release, then review” approach works well for content where the average reader can evaluate the quality of the article. For example: in a typical Wikipedia article, a reader has many ways to determine how much trust to place in the  information provided. Readers can check citations, cross-reference the information provided in the article with other sources, review the change history and discussions, and so on.

While it is relatively easy for the average person to verify a mundane encyclopedia article, most of us can’t verify legal information (or other specialized and complex knowledge like software or medical information). A consequence of this is that Wikipedia’s model is a poor fit for LexPublica. If we chose to release agreement templates before they were reviewed, we’d be inviting disaster for everyone who chose to use them.

In the Linux and open source software world, most projects fend off disaster by releasing only after review. In Linux’s example, multiple reviews are performed on code (and indirectly, contributors) before it is released to a large group of self-selecting testers for another review. Only after this chain of reviews is code released for general use.

LexPublica will be following a model much like Linux’s, with contributions being reviewed by trusted community members before they are released for general use. These reviews will be part of a larger process to create and improve content. In the coming posts, we’ll write more about this process and the tools that we’ll need to support it.

In the months that we’ve been telling folks about LexPublica, we’ve heard a lot of different suggestions for the agreements that we should draft up for the alpha release in August. The most common requests for templates have been for:

• Consulting and service agreements
• Confidentiality/non-disclosure agreements
• Employment agreements
• Family agreements (such as pre-nuptial agreements and wills)
• Location and model releases
• Rights assignment agreements
• Website privacy policies and terms of service

If there is something on the list that you need but don’t see (or want to help draft), drop us a comment. We’re not going to promise that we’ll deliver any particular agreement, but the greater the interest in a given area, the more likely we’ll focus on it.

On July 7th, 2009 (which is today, as this post is being written) we’ll be delivering a 30 second pitch to a small crowd at DemoCamp Vancouver. If we successfully woo the assembled collection of bloggers, startup junkies and technologists, we’ll win one of the six-minute presentation slots in which we can elaborate.

Update: We did win one of the presentation slots, giving our little presentation to about 120 people.

The draft script for our 30-second pitch is:

Who here can afford a lawyer?

(Waiting for hands to lift and presuming that it won’t be many. Update: About 4 people from the crowd of 120  tentatively lifted their hands.)

That’s an indication of a really serious problem. No one can afford lawyers. Not individuals, not professionals, not small businesses. Not even lawyers can afford lawyers.

LexPublica is here to solve that problem.

Vote for us and we’ll tell you how we’re going to open source the law, save the world and make money at the same time.

The draft script for our six-minute presentation is:

Hi! I’m Martin, and I’m a lawyer.

and I’m Zak. I’m not a lawyer.

We’re both from LexPublica, a project to open source the law, save the world and make a bunch of money.

The law is a huge topic. A search for the word “legal” on Google returns about 790,000,000 results. To put that in perspective, a search for sex returns about 750,000,000 results. Our obsession with legal matters now seems to have outstripped our obsession with sex.

This is a reflection of the crying need for access to legal help. No one can afford lawyers. Individuals, professionals and small businesses can’t afford lawyers. Startups can’t afford lawyers. Big companies with large budgets for legal services can’t afford lawyers. Even lawyers complain, in all earnestness, that they can’t afford lawyers.

LexPublica aims to solve this problem by opening up the world of legal knowledge to everyone.

The first practical step we’ll take is to make common contracts available free of charge. These will include things that most of us need, such as employment agreements, website development agreements and non-disclosure agreements (NDA’s for short). The contracts will be written in plain English and have supporting guides to help you use them properly.

Along with the contracts, we’ll provide other information about contracts and the law to help you make informed decisions. With that, you can also make a better decision about when you want do prepare a contract yourself and when you want to get a lawyer.

Take a non-disclosure agreement as an example.

When you get an NDA sent to you, and you’re uncomfortable signing it (because it looks one-sided), you’ll be able to come to LexPublica and get background info on typical provisions in NDA’s and what they mean.

LexPublica will give you the understanding to go back to the other party and negotiate better wording for the NDA (or send them a copy of LexPublica’s standard NDA).

If instead you’re the one who needs to send the NDA, you’ll be able to come to the LexPublica website to get that. You can choose a simple NDA for simple deals and a more detailed NDA’s for more complex deals. A guide to NDAs will help you what is appropriate.

No more one-sided contracts.  No more being at the mercy of someone else’s contract because you can’t afford a lawyer.

With LexPublica, you’ll have the benefit of open source law, putting control of your legal life back in your hands.

Tackling an enterprise of this magnitude requires a team bigger than just the two of us. LexPublica will need to be a global online community of lawyers and non-lawyers working together to create a global legal commons.

Wikipedia, Linux and other similar projects provide successful and similarly size examples for us to follow.

So far, we’ve told you about LexPublica, and how we’re giving stuff away for free.

What we haven’t yet told you yet is how we’re going to make money.

There’s a commercial twin to LexPublica, called 8.5×14 (named after legal size paper).  It will provide wide range of commercial services, both for lawyers and for people who need legal services. These services will be build around LexPublica’s open content and open APIs.

For example, imagine an online workspace to manage your business’s standard contract templates, your contract negotiations and your dealings with your lawyer. The service is simple contract management, something like the Basecamp project management web service, but for contracts and negotiations.

So if you’re the person in your company who deals with contracts and the paperwork that goes along with it, you’ll be able to do that faster and more efficiently.  Instead of emailing versions of contracts in Microsoft Word back and forth with your customers (and with you lawyer too, if you’re using lawyer), and losing track of who’s got the most up-to-date version and who made what changes, you’ll have the online workspace  – again like Basecamp – to manage that process and to manage the evolving versions with proper change tracking. You can get the deal done faster, with less headache.

Intrigued? We hope so.

We’d like you to help LexPublica in two ways:

1. Tell us your problems with contracts and getting legal help.
2. Spread the word about our blog.

You can catch us here tonight, or drop us by email.

You can also keep up to date with our blog, and watch for our alpha release at the end of August.

The spelling of English is a small bugbear for websites with an international focus – especially for those few sites like LexPublica that need to dance on the point at the intersection of correctness, comprehensibility and the law. While spelling isn’t the biggest issue we’re facing, it is still important for us to choose a consistent and well-considered approach.

An early example of the issue is “licence”. In much of the English-speaking world, licensing is accomplished through a licence. The licence is the document, while license is the activity. In the United States, however, license may also refer to the document.

Choosing to use licence or license is a small point, but attention to detail is significant because we’re building a legal commons and precision in language matters in the law. It matters especially because one of LexPublica’s long-term objectives is the standardization of contracts and contract language.

When we hashed out the issue, the major choices seemed to be: laziness, provincialism, simplicity or commonality.

The lazy approach is to let spelling sort itself out in the future, as it becomes an issue. We didn’t think that this would be a particularly good approach to take – we’ll have enough trouble with doing this sort of thing by accident.

Provincialism would let us stick to the Canadian dialect of English and subject others to our uncomfortable compromise between British and US English. This approach might nettle our friends to the south and induce them to waste time fiddling with the spelling in LexPublica documents.

Simplicity would let us choose the simplest version of any given spelling, dialects be damned.

Finally, commonality would dictate that we choose the variant shared across the greatest number of dialects.

Of all the approaches, commonality seems to give us the best result. So long as the meaning is consistent with the shared spelling, then the common spelling has the best chance of having the right meaning to the most people.

It’s been a surprising amount of work to come to the decision to use “licence” as the noun and “license” as the verb.

Like many rules, this rule has an exception: when “license” appears in the name of a specific document, or when quoting from a document, one should leave the use as is. For example:

The Creative Commons Attribution License is the licence used by LexPublica to license its blog content.

Of course, this is the kind of issue for which style manuals are written. We’ll write more about our plans for a community-developed style manual for contract drafting in another post.

In Light Your Taper, we talked about freely sharing our ideas and plans. Beyond writing publicly about them, there’s another important component to sharing freely: letting others use and build on your work.

Applying these principles to our blog, we’ve chosen to license our writings under the Creative Commons Attribution License. In essence, the licence means anyone can use our blog content for any purpose — commercial or non-commercial — so long as they give us credit.

This choice of a very permissive licence helps us share what LexPublica is working on, as widely as possible. Spreading the word about LexPublica is valuable to us, increasing our visibility and helping us find collaborators. The permissive licensing is also intended to enable others to leverage this content, adapt to their own purposes, and re-publish it.

In a future post, we’ll write about our thinking on the choice of licensing for LexPublica’s free contract templates and free information on how to use those templates. Quick preview: we’re inclined to use the same Creative Commons Attribution License. We’d love to hear from you if you have any views or comments on that.