Meeting Notes from today's meeting

[John Quentin Heywood <heywood@wcl.american.edu>]

Hey Folks,

Here are the notes from our meeting, the chat log, and your assignment.

Thanks to all those who could make it. The attendees were myself, Frank Bennett, John Joergensen, Ken Hirsh, and Michael Neuren. I really do appreciate your efforts.

We started out discussing the use-case draft I posted in mid-March. The consensus was that it is on the right track. We spent a fair amount of time discussing the docket number in all its glory.

Frank mentioned that in some systems, notably Japan, there is a "subject identifier" at the beginning of a docket number, that in addition to giving some idea as to the issues presented, may also indicate the court or court level. He wondered if we needed to break that out as a separate field. In the ensuing discussion, we came to the conclusion that we should treat it as a part of the number. In other words, treat the docket number as a whole entity. The reasoning was that while the field was important to lawyers in the jurisdiction, it wasn't really significant in identifying the specific document for retrieval purposes. Michael noted that docket numbers in the US vary considerably, with similar features (a "CV" for civil cases and a "CR" for criminal cases, for example). We noted that the use-case document should indicate that docket numbers can fail in several ways: (1) for courts that append the assigned judge's initials to the docket number, these may or may not change if the case is reassigned; (2) the format of docket numbers not only varies greatly from court system to court system internationally, but also domestically. Even courts in the same state/province level may have different schema; (3) the format of docket numbers within the same court/court system may vary considerably over time; and (4) in the wild, citations may leave off part of the canonical docket number (instead of 2:14-01234-SLC, you might get 14-1234).

As a side note, I have a question that we can discuss at the next meeting: Should we be calling it a "docket number" or is that too parochial? Should we call it a "case-indentifying number" or will that just be more confusing than "docket number?"

We moved on to the list of Data Item Categories on the first page of the use-case draft. We need to look at these and make sure that we have covered everything. So, YOUR ASSIGNMENT, should you decide to accept it, is to, before the next meeting/call, read the list in the draft and ruminate about it. Then provide some written feedback to the SC on the sufficiency of the list in describing the necessary data elements to positively identify a court document.

Our next meeting/conference call will be on Wednesday, 22 April 2015, from 4 to 5pm EDT, or 8 to 9pm UTC (which is 5 to 6am on Thursday, 23 April 2015, in Japan).

Talk to you all then. Here is the chat log (not much there):

John Heywood: Please remember to record your attendance: https://www.oasis-open.org/apps/org/workgroup/legalcitem-courts/event.php?event_id=40199
Frank: NOW good morning!
anonymous morphed into johnj
anonymous morphed into Michael Neuren
johnj: Hello Michael.
Frank: CourtListener database (basis of the CL parsing engine): https://github.com/freelawproject/reporters-db/blob/master/reporters.json

-- 
John Quentin Heywood
heywood@american.edu