The use of legal software by non-lawyers and the perils of unauthorised practice of law charges in the United States: a review of Jayson Reynoso decision

This paper critically reviews the judgment of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit In re: Jayson Reynoso: Frankfort Digital Services et al., v. Sara L. Kistler, United States Trustee et al. (2007) 447 F.3d 1117. The appellants, who were non-lawyers, were indicted with unauthorised practice of law for offering bankruptcy petition services via online legal software or expert systems in law configured for filing bankruptcy petition forms. The United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit found inter alia that appellants were bankruptcy petition preparers, and not being lawyers, had exceeded their clerical remit by offering legal advice and legal services in contravention of California law regulating legal practice and 11 U.S.C. Sect. 110 of the Bankruptcy Code (2002). While examining the legal ramifications of the use of legal software by non-lawyers in the preparation of legal documents, the paper critically reviews the factual circumstances of the Reynoso decision in the context of juridical and statutory constructs of unauthorised practice of law in the United States. The paper poses the question whether Reynoso should be viewed as a one-off decision bound by its peculiar facts, or good law for the broad proposition that non-lawyers cannot use legal software in legal documents preparation. The paper also notes the possible legal barriers to an unconditional ban on the design, sale, distribution, and uses of legal software by non-lawyers. These range from the First Amendment right to free speech, constitutional right to pro se legal representation, interstate commerce doctrine, to antitrust provisions of the Sherman Act. A regime of best practices for the use of legal software or expert systems in law by non-lawyers is proffered.     

Bilingual legal document retrieval and management using XML

In certain bilingual and multi‐lingual societies, translated legal documents are as important as the original legal documents because they have the same legal status as the originals. However, there is little reported work on the retrieval and management of bilingual legal documents. We describe the design and development of a bilingual document retrieval and management prototype, called ELDoS, which is used by court interpreters and judges from the Hong Kong Judiciary. Since the speed of retrieval is a major concern for user acceptance, and therefore for widespread deployment of the system, the architecture of the prototype is designed to balance the workload of the client and server. Extensible Markup Language (XML) is used to mark up the bilingual legal documents for a variety of document retrieval and management tasks. XML enables the use of XML Stylesheet Language Transformation (XSLT) to align bilingual data in the client, instead of the server, and improve alignment speed linearly with respect to the size of the document, using a high‐end PC, when the server has no concurrent access. The design of the interface was continually improved after extensive consultation with court interpreters and after the user acceptance tests. In our evaluation, the facilities for highlighting translated terms have a macro‐averaged precision of 90+% and a macro‐average recall of 80+%, which were considered acceptable by our users. We believe that the experience in the design and development of this prototype is applicable to other language pairs as well as to other domains. Copyright © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The structuring of legal knowledge in LOIS

Legal information retrieval is in need of the provision of legal knowledge for the improvement of search strategies. For this purpose, the LOIS project is concerned with the construction of a multilingual WordNet for cross-lingual information retrieval in the legal domain. In this article, we set out how a hybrid approach, featuring lexically and legally grounded conceptual representations, can fit the cross-lingual information retrieval needs of both legal professionals and laymen     

Age-related differences in the initial usability of mobile device icons

Mobile devices offer much potential to support older adults (age 65+). However, older adults have been relatively slow to adopt mobile devices. Although much ongoing HCI research has examined usability problems to address this issue, little work has looked at whether existing graphical icons are harder to use for this population compared with younger adults. We conducted a qualitative exploratory study and a follow-up experimental study to determine which icon characteristics help initial icon usability for older adults. We found that our older participants did have more problems using existing mobile device icons, but that particular icon characteristics – semantically close meaning (i.e. natural, close link between depicted objects and associated function), familiar, labelled and concrete (i.e. those depicting real-world objects) – improved icon usability for them. We discuss how these findings can help icon designers to create mobile device icons that are more suited to the abilities and technology experience of older adults.     

Understanding the law: improving legal knowledge dissemination by translating the contents of formal sources of law

Considerable attention has been given to the accessibility of legal documents, such as legislation and case law, both in legal information retrieval (query formulation, search algorithms), in legal information dissemination practice (numerous examples of on-line access to formal sources of law), and in legal knowledge-based systems (by translating the contents of those documents to ready-to-use rule and case-based systems). However, within AI & law, it has hardly ever been tried to make the contents of sources of law, and the relations among them, more accessible to those without a legal education. This article presents a theory about translating sources of law into information accessible to persons without a legal education. It illustrates the theory by providing two elaborated examples of such translation ventures. In the first example, formal sources of law in the domain of exchanging police information are translated into rules of thumb useful for policemen. In the second example, the goal of providing non-legal professionals with insight into legislative procedures is translated into a framework for making available sources of law through an integrated legislative calendar. Although the theory itself does not support automating the several stages described, in this article some hints are given as to what such automation would have to look like.

The influence of a knowledge-based system on designers' cognitive activities: a study involving professional web designers

Over the last few decades, several usability knowledge-based systems have been developed to provide user interface designers with usability knowledge (e.g. heuristics, usability guidelines, standards). Such systems are intended to assist designers during the design process, and to improve the usability of the user interface being designed. However, the assumption that such systems actually improve the usability of the resulting user interface remains to be demonstrated: virtually no systems have been empirically tested by designers who create products. In order to confirm this assumption, we conducted an experimental study in which professional web designers had to create webpages, either using a knowledge-based system – MetroWeb – or without it. This study was intended to determine the influence of MetroWeb on the professional web designers' cognitive activity, and to find out whether MetroWeb actually assists them to develop a user-centred design. The results show that the web designers did not very often use MetroWeb while designing webpages; however, rather surprisingly, the designers who did use MetroWeb more often exhibited a user-centred activity than those working without MetroWeb. We conclude this paper by discussing these findings, and suggesting future possible ways of research intended to assist designers to adopt a user-centred approach to their activity.     

A Knowledge Engineering Framework for Intelligent Retrieval of Legal Case Studies

Juris-Data is one of the largest case-study base in France. The case studies are indexed by legal classification elaborated by the Juris-Data Group. Knowledge engineering was used to design an intelligent interface for information retrieval based on this classification. The aim of the system is to help users find the case-study which is the most relevant to their own.The approach is potentially very useful, but for standardising it for other legal document bases it is necessary to extract a legal classification of the primary documents. Thus, a methodology for the construction of these classifications was designed together with a framework for index construction. The project led to the implementation of a Legal Case Studies Engineering Framework based on the accumulated experimentation and the methodologies designed. It consists of a set of computerised tools which support the life-cycle of the legal document from their processing by legal experts to their consultation by clients.     

Innovative techniques for legal text retrieval

Legal text retrieval traditionally relies upon external knowledge sources such as thesauri and classification schemes, and an accurate indexing of the documents is often manually done. As a result not all legal documents can be effectively retrieved. However a number of current artificial intelligence techniques are promising for legal text retrieval. They sustain the acquisition of knowledge and the knowledge-rich processing of the content of document texts and information need, and of their matching. Currently, techniques for learning information needs, learning concept attributes of texts, information extraction, text classification and clustering, and text summarization need to be studied in legal text retrieval because of their potential for improving retrieval and decreasing the cost of manual indexing. The resulting query and text representations are semantically much richer than a set of key terms. Their use allows for more refined retrieval models in which some reasoning can be applied. This paper gives an overview of the state of the art of these innovativetechniques and their potential for legal text retrieval.     

Visual interface for searching and browsing children’s WebOPAC

This study focuses on the visual interface design of WebOPAC, which assists children in carrying out searching and browsing activities for bibliographical information in a library database. The existing interface of WebOPAC, called Ilmu, is investigated in this study; the interface is efficient in retrieving information from the database; however, its poor graphic design causes major usability problems. The graphic design of Ilmu is important in helping children to understand and visualise concepts of searching and browsing. Therefore, the interface must be constructed in such a way that can meet the needs of children aged 7–11 years. In this study, an analysis has been carried out on children’s requirements for the graphic design through participatory design activities using two approaches: cooperative inquiry and sketching of ideas. The cooperative Inquiry approach involved 40 children, while sketching children’s ideas involved 20 children as respondents. A total of 14 requirement specifications were generated and categorised into four areas—use of space, information organisation, function and use of colours; these would serve as a basis in designing a new WebOPAC interface. Synthesis of these requirements has shown that they are best supported through the implementation of visual interface display techniques. Chi-squared (χ ²) test was used to test the responses of children towards the usability of the new interface; the results showed a high level of acceptance by the children, recording a rate of 83.98 %.     

Model mismatch analysis: Towards a deeper explanation of users' usability problems

An evaluation method is proposed based on walkthrough analysis coupled with a taxonomic analysis of observed problems and causes of usability error. The model mismatch method identifies usability design flaws and missing requirements from user errors. The method is tested with a comparative evaluation of two information retrieval products. Different profiles of usability and requirements problems were found for the two products, even though their overall performance was similar.     

Model mismatch analysis: towards a deeper explanation of users' usability problems

An evaluation method is proposed based on walkthrough analysis coupled with a taxonomic analysis of observed problems and causes of usability error. The model mismatch method identifies usability design flaws and missing requirements from user errors. The method is tested with a comparative evaluation of two information retrieval products. Different profiles of usability and requirements problems were found for the two products, even though their overall performance was similar.     

Ontology-based similarity for product information retrieval

Product development of today is becoming increasingly knowledge intensive. Specifically, design teams face considerable challenges in making effective use of increasing amounts of information. In order to support product information retrieval and reuse, one approach is to use case-based reasoning (CBR) in which problems are solved “by using or adapting solutions to old problems.” In CBR, a case includes both a representation of the problem and a solution to that problem. Case-based reasoning uses similarity measures to identify cases which are more relevant to the problem to be solved. However, most non-numeric similarity measures are based on syntactic grounds, which often fail to produce good matches when confronted with the meaning associated to the words they compare. To overcome this limitation, ontologies can be used to produce similarity measures that are based on semantics. This paper presents an ontology-based approach that can determine the similarity between two classes using feature-based similarity measures that replace features with attributes. The proposed approach is evaluated against other existing similarities. Finally, the effectiveness of the proposed approach is illustrated with a case study on product–service–system design problems.     

Dual Verbal Elicitation: The Complementary Use of Concurrent and Retrospective Reporting Within a Usability Test

Verbal protocols are the primary tool for understanding users' task-solving behaviors during usability testing. A qualitative study that examined the utility of combining a concurrent and retrospective think-aloud within the same usability test is described. The results indicate that although there was significant overlap between the types of utterances produced during each think-aloud, the retrospective phase produced more verbalizations that were relevant to usability analysis, for example, helpful self-assessments of performance, yielding insights into the impact of encountered difficulties. However, a small number of less desirable utterance types emerged: hypothesising, rationalizing, and forgetting. When used together, both methods contributed to an understanding of usability issues; the concurrent phase yielded more usability issues overall, and the retrospective data improved the understanding of these by (a) reinforcement: users highlighted the impact of an issue on their experience, (b) elaboration: users would provide causal explanations of encountered difficulties, and (c) context: users provided information about the product's context of use.     

面向法律文书的自然语言理解

法律人工智能因其高效、便捷的特点,近年来受到社会各界的广泛关注。法律文书是法律在社会生活中最常见的表现形式,应用自然语言理解方法智能地处理法律文书内容是一个重要的研究和应用方向。该文梳理与总结面向法律文书的自然语言理解技术,首先介绍了五类面向法律文书的自然语言理解任务形式: 法律文书信息提取、类案检索、司法问答、法律文书摘要和判决预测。然后,该文探讨了运用现有自然语言理解技术应对法律文书理解的主要挑战,指出需要解决好法律文书与日常生活语言之间的表述差异性、建模好法律文书中特有的推理与论辩结构,并且需要将法条、推理模式等法律知识融入自然语言理解模型。     

Metaform: updatable form screens and their application to the use of office metaphors in query language instruction

Abstract

A database interface language and system, called Metaform, which automatically generates multi-relational form screen interfaces for use by non-computer professionals has been developed. A form screen is a subset of the relational database, with a particular relation or combination of relations being represented. Through form screens, users can simultaneously query and update several relations in the database without having to know about its underlying structure. An overview of the Metaform system is presented and several examples of the use of the Metaform query language and update operators are described.

A series of ‘usability’ studies were conducted on a prototype of the Metaform system to examine the claims that the form concept aids computer-naive users in building complex database queries. These studies adopted the form screen concept to present six office paper work analogies to users to help them to understand the database retrieval concepts. The analogies of a file cabinet, a file folder, a stack of forms, a single form, a table of information on a form and a field of information were used in a two-staged training module.

At the end of each training sequence, users answered questions with the prototype and with paper and pencil which tapped their understanding of the database retrievals they were learning to perform. The results from these questionnaires were mixed. Users performed successful relational queries for simple retrievals and for those using existential quantifiers. They had difficulty with queries involving multiple steps and intermediate stages. Although users understood and used the analogies, they ran into difficulties with the ambiguities in the English statements of the queries, thus suggesting a need for another level of metaphors and/or problem representation tools not associated with the machine but with the user's comprehension of database retrieval problems.     

A blessing,not a curse: Experimental evidence for beneficial effects of visual aesthetics on performance

The present experiment investigated the effect of visual aesthetics on performance. A total of 257 volunteers completed a series of search tasks on a website providing health-related information. Four versions of the website were created by manipulating visual aesthetics (high vs. low) and usability (good vs. poor) in a 2 × 2 between-subjects design. Task completion times and error rates were used as performance measures. A main effect of usability on both error rates and completion time was observed. Additionally, a significant interaction of visual aesthetics and usability revealed that high aesthetics enhanced performance under conditions of poor usability. Thus, in contrast to the notion that visual aesthetics may worsen performance, visual aesthetics even compensated for poor usability by speeding up task completion. The practical and theoretical implications of this finding are discussed.     

Tracing Requirements Errors to Problems in the Requirements Engineering Process

A case study of requirements engineering practice is reported. The application, a decision support system for the Greek Ministry of Health, was investigated by studying the process of requirements analysis through to design and implementation. A usability analysis was then conducted on the designed system with the users. Several usability problems were discovered, and interviews uncovered further problems with the system that could be attributed to failure in requirements engineering (RE). Even though requirements were explicitly stated and the system was an evolution from an existing legacy system, functionality was defective and usability was poor. The client’s prime concern for redeveloping the system was to improve usability; unfortunately communications problems in the RE process meant that the developers did not appreciate this. The implications for RE methods and understanding the RE process are discussed.     

Creating natural language interfaces to VR systems

Two research projects are described that explore the use of spoken natural language interfaces to virtual reality (VR) systems. Both projects combine off-the-shelf speech recognition and synthesis technology with in-house command interpreters that interface to the VR applications. Details about the interpreters and other technical aspects of the projects are provided, together with a discussion of some of the design decisions involved in the creation of speech interfaces. Questions and issues raised by the projects are presented as inspiration for future work. These issues include: requirements for object and information representation in VR models to support natural language interfaces; use of the visual context to establish the interaction context; difficulties with referencing events in the virtual world; and problems related to the usability of speech and natural language interfaces in general.     

A study on the acceptance of website interaction aids by older adults

The goal of the present work is to investigate the potential acceptance of a set of web interaction aids by older adults, in order to help them overcome difficulties associated with ageing and help them continue using the web as a source of information, communication and services. This paper presents a survey with older adults concerning their perceptions about a set of web interaction aids defined after a field observation study, a study with questionnaires and user tests of web applications. The survey involved 313 participants, of which about 44 % were older adults and elderly users. The results showed that the use of aids to support the interaction of older adults with the web promotes improvements in the interaction of older adults and younger users alike, which supports the argument for enhanced universal usability. Finally, it was possible to diagnose barriers that still remain and which aids had best acceptance by older adults.     

Consumer Health Informatics Interventions Must Support User Workflows,Be Easy-To-Use,and Improve Cognition: Applying the SEIPS 2.0 Model to Evaluate Patients’ and Clinicians’ Experiences with the CONDUIT-HID Intervention

ABSTRACT

The aim of this research was to gain a holistic understanding of patients’ and clinicians’ experiences with the CONDUIT-HID (CONtrolling Disease Using Inexpensive Technology—Hypertension In Diabetes) intervention, intended to be a technology-enabled consumer health informatics (CHI) approach to control hypertension. We examined patients’ experiences utilizing the technologies to share patient blood pressure data with their care team via a qualitative analysis of patient (n = 21) and clinician (n = 5) interviews. Using the SEIPS 2.0 sociotechnical systems model, our evaluation revealed that minimizing usability issues and supporting participant workflow were important—but not sufficient—for CHI intervention success. The ability of the CHI intervention to support the cognitive development of patients’ self-management skills and to facilitate strategic collaboration among care team members was also important. These insights can provide CHI and the human–computer interaction (HCI) communities with a framework of generalizable findings to better design future CHI interventions.