However, it is not clear that merely transferring these technologies to the legal services context will be sufficient.Rather changes in both content providing and content consuming organizations will be needed for these innovations to be used to best effect.
At
the simplest level, this means that the user is welcomed by name: “Welcome
Richard”.At the next level, the
system offers the user the option to customize their own display by answering
questions – where do you live, what sports team do you favor, which newspapers
news are you most interested in?
The
next level customization is driven not by the users conscious choice but
by the information the portal has collected about the users prior selections
and behavior.A portal can, for
example give a user news based on the news links that the user has previously
followed, or can tell of new books based on prior interests of purchases
of the user.Of course, as time
goes by, more and more of this information is driven by commercial and
marketing concerns, and more and more of it is provided by content owners
outside, but in partnership with the portal itself.Depending
on the marketing strategies and the relative bargaining power of the partners,
this linkage may be totally transparent, or totally obvious to the user.[1]
This
capacity is driven by improvements in power of the databases linked to
the web servers, and by changes in the way client software on the users
computer communicates with the servers on which the data is stored.[2]
The
same kind of technology can be used to create user-specific legal home
pages for either clients or advocates.
Firstly,
the volume of information indexed on the web is increasing exponentially.
Secondly,
of necessity, driven by the impossibility of finding what the user needs
finding mechanismsare coming to
depend less and less on raw indexing strength, and more and more on patters
of prior searches, on automatic intelligent editing of searches on and
relationship between sites and usage.[4]More
and more of the search sites are driven by experience, and by detailed
expert review of the information.[5]
Similarly,
branding is becoming more and more important, with specialist sites having
the most detailed information, being recognized in the market as the leaders,
and being linked to by the main portals.These
links are the subject of complex and high-powered financial transactions.
To
the extent that there is cross linking by hyper-linking from website to
website, the system is idiosyncratic rather than systematic, and its utility
for any one user is dependant on chance rather than on plan.Similarly,
even if the material is properly findable in a search engine, it is hard
to search in terms that the information is actually needed, or in the ways
that it is thought about by the searcher.
Extensible
Markup Language (XML) offers some solutions to these problems of the legal
community, potentially both in terms of client data and advocate data.Put
succinctly, XML allows information (including legal information) to be
structured in such a way that it can be retrieved according to its content,
not just its words.This is achieved
by having the content “labeled” and structured according to pre-existing
rules and definitions.Such rules
and definitions can be established for any field, and indeed have been
established for many fields.[8]
In
the legal information context, an XML standard might include information
about type of legal material, date, author, substantive content, topic
area, skill needed, and the like.Indeed,
various working groups and various private vendors are already building
varied XML standards for the legal community.[9]
Such
client and advocate XML standards would make it easy for centralized systems
to access information on many many servers, index them, and make them available
to large populations.Most importantly,
submission to these systems could be automated.
One
of the major commercial products is Entry Point, which offers the typicalscrolling
“ticker” and customizable menu bar on the downloadable desktop.[10]Within
the legal services community, the main implementation of this technology
has been Handsnet, the first and most traditional provider of news content
to the legal services community.The
Handsnet WebClipper routinely monitors about 500 websites for changes or
additions, and sends subscribers a daily e-mail bulletin listing these
changes and providing links.Each
user can customize his or her feed based on interests such as “families
and children.”
While
the legal services community has made some use of this tool, its adoption
has been relatively limited.Generally
the feedback seems to be that the information is too general, and not specific
to the legal services community.However,
Handsnet has created a working technology that actually delivers updates
on line and is currently functioning.As
such it provides an important model, and a source of lessons.A
Handsnet subscription costs $100 a year or $10 a month[11].
Similarly,
BackWeb is a commercial product that is programmed to pre-review certain
environments, collect additionally submitted information, and send it out,
filtered by subscriber filters to users.This
software is expensive, very awkward to install and use, and is therefore
used mainly by corporations that seek to maintain very tight control over
their users; it illustrates the changes that are occurring in information
retrieval.[12]
For
pages that had to change regularly, such as calendars, publication lists,
resource lists, or newspapers such as he New York Times[13]
that was highly labor intensive and very expensive.Recent
developments and new software products such as Cold Fusion[14]
(a web authoring environment) make it possible for programmers to build
systems that let people fill in a simple on-line web from which automatically
updates the appropriate web pages.[15]
The
submission form can be built so that the submitter describes the information,
categorizing it by subject, keyword, date, etc.A
user can then request that the display web page show only that information.[16]
Within
the legal services community, the best example of this approach is ProBononet,[17]
in which calendars and resource information for different practice areas
are submitted by experts in appropriate organizations.Probono.net
provides an important model both technically and organizationally.Other
nonprofit examples include Open Studio – The Arts On-line, a collaboration
of the Benton Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts,[18]
and Connect for Kids, a multi-featured site that provides resources for
child-serving organizations and communities.[19]
Packages
such as iRenaissance[20]
are commercially built software environments that come with templates that
allow for any group of organizations to create a centralized web site to
which information and calendars can be submitted by all member organizations,
and which can be viewed according to pre-set filters.
Using
this model, for example a legal services information entity, instead of
purchasing their own servers, server software and programming language,
would rent (or be given) access to this software on already functioning
Internet servers. Such servers could handle case management, intake, referral,
information, litigation support, and indeed the whole emerging legal technology
support system.[23]
This
would make it far easier for an innovation to start up without huge start-up
costs and maintenance and programming overhead.[24]
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