This message is being cross posted to BUSLIB-L, INFOPRO-L, LAW-LIB,
and LEXISUSER-L.
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UNIFORM NON-PROPRIETARY CITES:
AN OPPORTUNITY FOR BROAD-BASED COOPERATION
Authors in the legal media and several Internet user groups are
debating the creation of non-proprietary citation systems in
federal and state courts. The reality is that court automation,
the advent of the information superhighway and several visionary
courts have already moved the legal profession beyond the
debating phase.
Numerous courts already distribute opinions on electronic
judicial bulletin boards, E-mail systems and official court
electronic filing programs (Complex Litigation Automated Docket
[CLAD] in Delaware). At last count, 24 states, the U.S. Circuit
Courts of Appeals and U.S. Supreme Court provide electronic
access through bulletin boards or are considering such a move.
Now, some courts are taking the next obvious step and exploring
how to develop citation systems that allow them to put permanent,
non-proprietary cites on all their opinions from the day of
issuance. This allows the immediate dissemination of the law
regardless of publishing media: online, CD-ROM, print, microfilm
or other newly emerging technologies. That is what the Sixth
Circuit and the Louisiana state courts have done and what
Wisconsin and other states are considering.
Mead Data Central (MDC), the provider of the LEXIS(R)/NEXIS(R)
services, believes that it is time for legal publishers to become
key participants in a collaborative effort among all interested
parties and to assist these federal and state courts in creating
and adopting non-proprietary cites.
The beneficiaries of such a collaboration are many. They include
the practicing bar, law librarians, paralegals, the judiciary,
clerks of court, as well as the general public. The benefits
include:
-- Access to case law for the most number of people at
the lowest cost. In an era when the general public
increasingly demands access to public information, existing
publishers, newly emerging publishers and courts can be
responsive to taxpayers and private sector customers.
-- Improved currentness and efficiency of case
citation for all legal professionals. By providing a means
of immediately and uniquely identifying opinions issued by
the courts, public domain cites are a cornerstone for
disseminating opinions via bulletin boards, CD-ROM, print
and other publishing media.
-- Assistance to overworked clerk's offices. By speeding court
information to law firms and publishers, clerks of court can
reduce the staff time needed to respond to requests for
copies of opinions.
-- For judges, easier access to their colleagues' opinions stored
on the court's computer databases.
MDC welcomes the opportunity to work with the courts and key
professional associations in their efforts to implement
non-proprietary cites.
The LEXIS/NEXIS services have been an innovator in changing the
way legal professionals research and access the law. As early as
1987, we released LEXIS(R) Cites and LEXIS pagination on federal
and state court opinions free of all copyright constraints. In
1992, we helped develop one of the first official electronic
filing programs with practicing bar and courts in Delaware
(CLAD).
Currently we are working with the ABA JEDDI committee, the
Wisconsin Law on Disk Committee, the AALL Task Force on Citation
Formats and others who support electronic non-proprietary cites.
We have also participated in the Workshop on Dissemination of
Government Information called by the Office of Management and
Budget (OMB). The OMB held this workshop on behalf of the
Government Information Working Group of the Information
Infrastructure Task Force's Information Policy Committee to
discuss access to judicial information, including the value of
non-proprietary cites.
MDC wants to insure that the non-proprietary cites eventually
adopted are compatible with the online time and cost-saving
features that legal professionals find so useful. Developing a
standard format now will avoid proliferation of non-standard,
disparate formats fashioned for individual media but with limited
utility across media.
MDC looks forward to working with the rule-making bodies of state
courts and key professional organizations exploring
non-proprietary cites. We encourage these groups to gather
comments from the practicing bar and legal publishers in a
collaborative effort to establish uniform, non-proprietary
citation formats that meet the needs of all legal professionals.
If readers have comments or want more information about MDC's
efforts to support non-proprietary cites please contact Monica
Yunag, Director of Editorial and Licensing Standards, at Mead
Data Central (9443 Springboro Pike, P.O. Box 933, Dayton, OH
45402; 513-865-6927 or myself (gaill@meaddata.com).
Gail H. Littlejohn (gaill@meaddata.com)
Editor-in-Chief and Vice President of Marketing Support
Mead Data Central
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