RE: [legalxml-econtracts] Official XML Records

["Chambers, Rolly" <rlchambers@smithcurrie.com>]

Whether a lawyer might want to share markup of the semantic content of a
court document would depend on what that content concerned. If it
involved "work product" (i.e. the mental impressions, theories, or
analysis of the lawyer), the lawyer will not want to share it, is
entitled to protect it from the opposing side, and might be forced to
disclose it only in fairly narrow circumstances.
 
Items such as names, addresses, document titles, etc. are probably less
of an issue.
 
There are some litigators who would not want to share any markup, even
of case or statutory citations, in order to gain a tactical advantage.
For instance, I might not want it to be easy for you as an opposing
attorney to access case or statutory authorities I've marked up as
citations in a brief. I'd rather make you spend the time and effort to
go back through my court document yourself and markup my citations. My
hope would be that you would not have the time, diligence, or know how
to do so, and thus might not raise an issue with an authority I've
cited.

	-----Original Message----- 
	From: John McClure 
	Sent: Sun 4/20/2003 8:02 PM 
	To: Legalxml-Econtracts 
	Cc: 
	Subject: [legalxml-econtracts] Official XML Records
	 
	. . .
	 
	Further, I assert it is essential that markup regarding the
semantic content of Court Documents be represented as annotations on the
XML elements themselves, not as separate, stand-aside markup
because,technically, "stand-aside" markup would be relatively harder to
create or modify than the embedded "names" notation, since it would rely
so completely on the somewhat complex machinery that XPATH provides to
reference substrings within content of an element. One possible
(related) solution I imagine is to package XSL-T output in a signed
package of resources, however I see this as a band-aid, because the
presentation still is divorced from, if it is correlated at all with,
the underlying semantice markup that LegalXML groups are defining --
hence, while the presentation artifact becomes the official record, to
which one can hyperlink, we lose all the benefit of searching for
specific semantic content within an official record. I urge us, instead,
towards a simple solution: annotate the official record with markup
names, and be done with it.
	 
	. . .

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