EL SENTIDO DEL EMPRENDEDOR

in the graph if they mention, modify or create one another. The sizes of nodes vary depending on the number of connections each has with other nodes in the graph. The colours used in the diagram correspond to groups of authorities which concern specific paragraphs of the Civil Code, with different colours pointing to different specific paragraphs. The platform allows for interactive navigation through the network.

One of the goals of any legal information system which seeks to visualise information about precedent and the content of case reports should be to bring the user close to the important content of the case report itself.Lexmexis a good if limited demonstration of this idea. Too many existing proposals for visualisation posit a particular view of data as the ultimate step in an activity. It is suggested that visualisation should be used to make sense of unstructured, complex information but that it should facilitate and maintain a search pathway to the full text of reports. In this way, the user themselves is the ultimate arbiter of significance and importance. In Ravel Law, there is an artificial separation between text and visualisation which means that reading case law is divorced from the heatmap view. An important legal skill which must be engendered in students is to take texts and to quickly ascertain the critical elements of them so that they may be dealt with. This ability is not taught or developed through differently-siloed, abstracted and isolated views of the text.

3.8 Collaboration environments for lawyers

“Collaboration is a common term in many industries, but a relatively new concept in the legal sector...It promotes innovation, creates capacity, manages risk, and drives quality and efficiency. So, if the business case is so compelling, why is collaboration in the legal industry not more widespread? The truth is, because it doesn’t form part of our DNA. We’re trained as adversaries and brought up in a siloed and competitive culture which recognises and rewards individual contribution.”[152]

The processes of legal research and preparing cases for court are highly col- laborative ventures. Research and legal drafting involves teams of associates, senior lawyers, junior lawyers, trainee lawyers, paralegals and partners. These

stakeholders work together to discover relevant information and to create various written documents and other collateral which will ultimately form the basis for submissions that are delivered by counsel in court. The final presentation of a case in front of the judge also involves multiple counsel who work together and deliver different parts of an argument and submission.

The introduction of computer hardware and computer software into this environ- ment places the case preparation endeavour firmly in the domain of Computer- Supported Collaborative Work (CSCW). Bowers and Benford’s general definition can be used for orientation here -“[i]n its most general form, CSCW examines the possibilities and effects of technological support for humans involved in collaborative group communication and work processes”[20].

The traditional matrix which is central to the domain of computer-supported collaborative work separates collaborative working environments into different categories. They can involve synchronous and collocated collaboration; syn- chronous but remote collaboration; asynchronous collocated collaboration and asynchronous remote collaboration. Thus the challenge of facilitating collaboration with computers concerns a range of effort to produce tools that bring people together, to create “shared workspaces” [88], to integrate suites of existing tools and to generally promote shared awareness in teams during the course of work activities.

In the legal domain, the awareness question becomes partly an issue of enabling senior lawyers or teachers to know that junior colleagues or students are thinking and working in plausible directions. There are often many different ways to apply the same cases and items of legislation to the facts of a scenario. The problem is non-trivial because case transcripts and statutes are not structured or demarcated according to their intended purpose or final outcome. Post-facto abstracts, headnotes and markup traditionally require input from legally-qualified writers who analyse and systematise the case through their knowledge and experience. The goal of awareness tracking and supervision in collaborative work has been described as aspiring to a“What I Understand Is What You Understand”

model for work activity [158].

“As lawyers, we did not return to Skype or instant messaging as a writing tool. Our writing practises seemed to lend themselves more to asynchronous (not occurring at the same time) rather than real-time collaboration. However,

3.8. Collaboration environments for lawyers

it’s also important to note that we never returned to our previous practice of one of us writing the first draft in Microsoft Word and sending it to the other as an email attachment. In large part, the reason was that the Writely collaborative online wordprocessing tool arrived on the Internet.”[92]

In their 2018 book, The Lawyer’s Guide To Collaboration Tools and Technologies, Kennedy and Mighell chart the development of general purpose tools which enable people to work together [92]. They then consider how these platforms can be applied by lawyers in their working practises. A set of guidelines for the successful use of group-based technology in the legal environment is produced. The authors advocate the use of tools ranging from track changes in stand-alone versions of Microsoft Word; Microsoft Office 365 and Google Docs for collaborative document drafting; Skype and Slack for instant messaging in groups; Microsoft Sharepoint for content publishing and sharing on intranets; Google Calendar and other products for scheduling; and the various content publishing and markup facilities available in modern versions of Adobe Acrobat. Once again, a jigsaw of different tools with varying interfaces and limited interoperability is the outcome. An examination over some time of activity and posts in technology forums for lawyers, such asThe Legal IT Information Networkon the LinkedIn business platform, indicates that attention on collaborative working technology is heavily orientated towards practice management, the mechanics of maintaining case files with inputs from multiple lawyers and the consequent financial activities of billing clients and managing lawyer-client relationships. There is relatively little discussion in either academic or professional circles about the creation of specialist products for lawyers and law students which enable and promote collaborative working especially for legal research.

Reed Elsevier do offer a version of theirLexisLibrarylegal information software which integrates with Microsoft Office 365. This enables legal research and drafting activities to take place in a single, integrated environment and within the interface of the word processor or any other component of the Office platform, including PowerPoint. Thomson offer a similar plug-in calledDrafting Assistantto integrate some elements ofWestlawinto Microsoft Office. These approaches have the side- effect of tying the law practice in to expensive licensing arrangements with both Lexis (or Westlaw) and Microsoft.

group working in other professions. Eighteen years ago, for example, [154] presented the results and conclusions from a trial of a shared patient record system in coordinating heterogeneous work amongst groups of doctors with some level of shared purpose in a collocated environment. He discusses the concept, creation and application of environments to allow for common understanding of information amongst groups of physicians, nurses and pharmacists who are engaged with the same patient but who all have different goals and immediate priorities. The later work of Heath et al [75] also contributes to the understanding of collaboration technologies in the medical field. The analogy of medical information to legal materials is superficially appropriate, in that patient data is ultimately parsed and constructed into diagnostic outcomes and treatment pathways. The rest of this thesis examines the need for bespoke software development in the legal domain which enables and promotes collaboration in an integrated environment for document drafting and legal research.