What I intend to talk briefly about is text processing, markup and standards. You have seen a page of my Web site called Yet Another Woolf Site. This site is devoted to the new Civil Procedure Rules which were introduced some 15 months ago. It contains copies of the rules and related practice directions and links them all together. However it also contains a lot of reports of cases where the courts, and in particular the Court of Appeal, have decided questions that have arisen in connection with the new Rules. There have already been about 40 Court of Appeal decisions. I have put as many of those cases as I can get hold of onto my site.
Naturally a number of those cases refer to earlier cases and it is useful to link the two together. In the HTML versions of the cases, citations of other cases are italicised. This gives rise to a couple of difficulties in using software to add the links between cases:
HTML is a markup language which has a very simple grammar. It is not possible to extend that grammar so as to get round these difficulties.
Another markup language, XML, eXtensible Markup Language, does not suffer from that problem. You can write your own grammar (provided you stick to certain conventions) and then use the markup that you have devised in your text.
I have done something like this with the cases on my site. To show you what I have done I have produced a very silly and contrived example.
As you can see in the first paragraph I have enclosed the entire citation between two tags, <case> and </case>. The reference is enclosed between <ref> and </ref> tags and the paragraph number between <para> and </para> tags.
An XML-capable Wordprocessor could read in this XML file together with the Grammar. It would work out that the text between <case> and <ref> must be the name of a case and italicise it. The reference it would put in a footnote and it might do the same with the Paragraph reference.
A program converting the file into HTML (so it could be read in a standard browser) might also italicise the case name. But it would also look it up in a database and, if it found it, would insert a link to it. It might leave the reference untouched, but it would add a link to the paragraph.
It could also store the name of the case and the place where it found it in the file in a table of contents. And it could store the fact that it had found it and where it had found it so that when it processed Smith v Jones it added an appropriate comment: "This paragraph is referred to in paragraph 41 of Doe \v Roe'' (with a link back).
The second paragraph of this example demonstrates how it is possible to markup text where there the Judge does not want the name of the case to appear in the printed document. A word processor would ignore Smith v Jones. A program converting the text into HTML would use the case name in order to add a hypertext link to the paragraph number but would not display it. And a program adding names of cases to a table of contents would use the case name.
That was a contrived example. I would like to show you quickly a real life example of how a program can convert a file marked up in this way into HTML. On 12th May 2000 the Court of Appeal gave judgment in a case called Tanfern v Cameron-MacDonald.
The main judgment was delivered by Lord Justice Brooke. He referred to a number of cases and I marked up each of them using tags like the ones you have seen. When I ran my software on it, it produced what you see here. If you go to the bottom of the lower menu, which is a table of contents, you will see a link to paragraph 21 of the report in Swain v Hillman. If you click on that link, you go to Paragaph~21 of the Tanfern report where the case is mentioned. There is a link at the end of it to "Para 10". Click on that link and the relevant paragraph of Swain appears in the bottom window. If you go to the end of paragraph 10 in Swain you will see a link back to Tanfern.
All these links were inserted automatically by the software. And the fact that the original file was marked up in the way I have shown made it much easier for the software to do this.
But XML markup is not limited to Judgments. It can also assist with any other form of legal documents. I would like to show you quickly a snippet from a Pleading marked up in a version of XML.
This shows a Claimant's details could be entered near the start of the file. The details of the Defendant would be similar and they could be followed by any other administrative stuff and then by the real body of the claim -- the allegations being made and so on.
The details shown here are essential so far as the Court Staff are concerned: they need to be able to contact the parties. The Court Staff are not, however, likely to be interested in the details of the claim itself. They will want to know the parties' estimates of the time it will take and so on but not the details of the allegations made.
Conversely the Judge is extremely unlikely to want to know the Claimant's home telephone number.
It would be trivial to write a computer program that would read a file marked up in this way and give the Court Staff the bits that they wanted and the Judge and litigators a file -- a word processed or electronic file -- headed with the names of the parties -- Jonathan Doe v Richard Roe -- but apart from that containing nothing but the meat of the pleadings.
No-one is going to want to type the sort of stuff I have just shown you manually. But there have for some time been high-end word-processors--such as those produced by Arbortext -- which read and write XML. The military, governments, and publishers use them extensively. But the mass market word-processors are also beginning to be able to read and write XML.
Obviously firms with rich clients may be able to afford this software but a litigant in person almost certainly cannot. But he does not need to. In the same way that it is possible to convert an XML file into an HTML file, it is possible to convert an HTML file into an XML file.
Standard HTML forms, running on a computer in the local Court office, could be used to enter the data. This link shows an example of an interactive form which could be used for this purpose.
Once details of the Claimant, the Defendant and the claim have been entered, you (as the Claimant) can click a button at the end of the form in order to send the details to the Court's server which will convert it into an XML file: an HTML version of the Claim Form will appear on the screen, a printed version could be produced for sending to the Defendant and the administrative details could be entered into the Court's database. (A version which I prepared earlier can be found here.)
That is a quick explanation of what I mean by text processing and markup. I also mentioned ``standards''. Although anyone can write the grammar for a particular application of XML there is no point in writing a grammar which only one person can understand.
The real technical name for an XML grammar is a DTD, or Document Type Definition. There are thousands of them in existence, mainly in the public domain, but there are also some specialised ones used by publishers and similar organisations.
There are also many groups working on public domain DTDs for use in specialised applications.
In America there is an organisation called LegalXML which was set up in 1998 by a handful of people to start work on DTDs for use with legal material. The number of people (including companies) who subscribe to LegalXML is increasing rapidly. In March there were about 250. In June there were 500 -- and the numbers are still increasing at the same sort of rate. The subscribers are publishers, software writers, court adminsistrators, academics and individuals and companies interested in the subject. Anyone can subscribe and receive the mailing lists but some of the latter are very technical. It is, however, well worth visiting the site and reading some of the Articles about XML -- which explain it far better than I have been able to do in this short talk. (Since the date of this talk I have become one of the chairmen of the legalXML working group on citations.)