I’m looking forward to giving a talk at the Tsinghua Computational Law Forum in Beijing later this week. The talk will be about "Expressing Law and Legal Processes as Standard Data Through Interoperable Service Interfaces".
The gist: increasingly, the data-driven, model-based algorithmic service types that have transformed other professions and industries are pulling the law, lawyers and legal processes toward revolutionary transformation. The first phase was duplicating manual processes locked in paper-document paradigms but expressed through digital formats such as word processing files and e-mail messages. In the current stage of change, apps and platforms provide faster, cheaper and more efficient methods for using, connecting and extending documents and messages. The next era, which has already started to emerge, is characterized by atomizing events and content into data that can express itself as an interoperable service, can trigger updates, alerts and other events in external but linked or integrated applications and can fuel chains of automated or computational systems. In the next era of computational law, legal content is created and collected in standard formats and structures that can be displayed as legal instruments or rules and that can be understood in plain language, parsed by lawyers and processed by machines. Computational law is quintessentially standard data flowing through integrated applications linked through interoperable services in a common, connected global system of legal content, instruments, events, and activities.