The development of common standards allows electronic information to be shared between computers. If legal documents such as judgments, transcripts and court filed documents are produced in a manner that is electronically consistent, these documents can be used at all stages of the court process, from trial through to ultimate appeal.

If legal information producers and publishers do not adopt common standards, those wanting to use judgments or transcripts in electronic form need to either process these documents manually or write purpose specific programs for each new format that is encountered. This adds considerable expense to the court process.

With an increasing number of courts and legislative departments publishing electronically, the need for standards to ensure accuracy and integrity is now urgent.

XML (eXtensible Markup Language) is a structured mark up language. This provides a way to define the structure and content of electronic documents with the following benefits:

• Information can be marked, or tagged, throughout the document;

• The tags within the document are descriptive, that is the tags themselves identify the information contained within the tags;

• A document can be compared against the Document Type Definition to ensure that all mandatory information has been tagged for that document;

• Not all tags are mandatory, therefore, a minimum amount of information can be captured;

• Information can be tagged irrespective of format, which means that a document that has been tagged can be formatted in accordance with an organisation's requirements.

Lawyers use information from documents over and over again e.g. name of the court, date of the hearing, case number and so on. The use of legal XML will allow this information to be reviewed and analyzed in powerful new ways.

By separating structure and content from presentation, the same XML source document can be written once and displayed in a variety of ways on a computer monitor. This means that although the data that is captured in different jurisdictions is the same, it can be presented in accordance with a particular court's requirements.

The use of commonly agreed sets of legal tags will allow data to be shared across jurisdictions. Without common agreement about these legal tags, the likely result would be many different tags for the same information. For example, <CourtFiling>, <COURT_FILING>, <filing>, are all different and incompatible tags in XML, but they convey a similar meaning in a legal environment. Incompatible tags mean that different software applications cannot "talk" to each other.

Legal XML (http://www.legalxml.org/) (obsolete link) is a non-profit organization with members from a variety of backgrounds including court managers, judges, lawyers, developers, software vendors and other interested parties. "Legal XML" seeks to bring legal and technical minds together in one forum to create a compatible set of open, non-proprietary, standard tags.

Legal XML Australia has been formed as a subgroup of Legal XML to promote the development of standards for online legal information in Australia. The group will provide a forum to promote and share information about Legal XML developments in Australia. Areas covered will include court filing, transcripts, legislation, and judgments.

The benefit of an Australia-wide organization such as Legal XML Australia is that it allows anyone from within the legal profession to contribute to standards for legal documents. This means that issues that touch across all jurisdictions can be discussed and standards agreed which can meet the requirements of courts, the legal profession and legal "industry" support groups.

Membership of Legal XML is open to anyone. To join Legal XML Australia go to http://www.legalxml.org/MembershipNew/ and select the Australia Workgoup.

Allison Stanfield
Principal Director,
eLaw Australia Pty Ltd
Level 10, 99 Elizabeth Street
SYDNEY NSW 2000
Telephone: (02) 9221 1366
Facsimile: (02) 9232 8248
Email: a.stanfield@elaw.net.au
hair Legal XML Australia

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