Introduction

Hi everyone,

I came across this mailing list...from another mailing list!

I'm presently a CodeX Fellow at Stanford Law School, where to be honest I don't really do anything in particular except go to interesting talks and work on PlainSite, a web site I started about a year and a half ago, which you can find at http://www.plainsite.org.

For a variety of reasons I'm interested in legal standards, more on the side of the judicial branch than the legislative, but there's more overlap than you might think. I actually recently submitted a brief proposal to the Knight Foundation News Challenge on this very topic, which you can find at https://www.newschallenge.org/open/open-government/submission/plainsite-gold-standard/. Although there are already ECF standards in place for courts, I think it's hard to argue that they're doing a very good job at getting anything standardized. My goal is to make a universal docketing system that can be used by average people, which PlainSite is slowly on its way to becoming.

Related to the proposals I've seen so far here, PlainSite makes use of a fairly extensive database schema that does overlap quite a bit with the schema proposed. There are still a number of tricky issues if you read between the lines, however--things like, what happens when a law firm acquires another law firm that itself has had several prior names and has separately merged with another firm?

Also, I recently read something about a Treasury initiative to introduce some standards for financial entity identification, which you can find at http://www.treasury.gov/initiatives/ofr/data/Documents/LEI_FAQs_February2013_FINAL.pdf. And then there's the OASIS working group on LegalXML at https://www.oasis-open.org/committees/tc_home.php?wg_abbrev=legalxml-courtfiling.

I look forward to the discussion on the list.

Aaron

Aaron Greenspan
CodeX Fellow | Stanford Center for Legal Informatics | http://codex.stanford.edu
Founder | PlainSite | http://www.plainsite.org