Tag Archives: computers and the law
Articles of Incorporation
One of the last assignments during Introduction to the Law was to compose articles of incorporation for a for-profit entity. I was frankly stunned at how short such a document could be–stunned enough that when I found the instructions on the Colorado Secretary of State website I thought it must have been an error. But no! It was entirely correct.
The forms provided on that website, by the bye, are available only in non-fillable/non-copy-paste-able PDF format, forcing one to either print them out and fill in the blanks by hand or to transcribe the necessary language into a word processor.
And the Department of State is not the only governmental agency that seemingly encourages electronic filing but fails to format their digital documents properly. The Federal District Court for Colorado uses all .rtf or WordPerfect document types, despite the ubiquity of Microsoft Office and the availability of non-proprietary formats. The El Paso County Combined Courts have family law forms with checkboxes made not with macros but with Wingdings. It took me a good half an hour just to figure out what key combination in Wingdings produces something approximating a ticked checkbox.
Suddenly instruction in how to apply styles in MS Word seems a bit more important.
Comparison between two Last Will and Testaments
This example was the first assignment for my Computers and the Law course, meant to display the use of Microsoft Word more than familiarity with the provisions and format of estate documents. I utilized online examples to find the best legal terminology I could with my current skills.
The second example, from Introduction to the Law about 3 months later, comes in three parts. The assignment was to create a joint will and a living trust agreement, but my research revealed that joint wills are discouraged (though still technically legal) in Colorado. Instead, I executed a pair of mutual wills and prepared the requisite trust agreement. By this point I had gained a much better grasp of the necessary provisions of a proper will and was able to modify the standard language more extensively to suit my needs.
Legal research cheat sheet
A list of web resources for fast, thorough legal research I put together for Introduction to Law. It was more than a little disturbing to me as a former librarian and FOIA officer that the state of Colorado farms its public statutes out to LexisNexis rather than managing their own website. The heavy reliance on the three dominant legal research companies (Lexis, Westlaw, and Loislaw) also made me uneasy. Call me a hippie or a hacker but I do believe that some information is meant to be free-as-in-beer and free-as-in-speech.
Primary Sources
Citation Web Location
State statute (CCR, CRS, COR) Colorado Constitution, Court Rules, Revised Statutes
United States Code (USC) United States Code
Cornell University browsable USC
Government Printing Office prior year codes
United States Code – Annotated (USCA) Westlaw signin
Code of Federal Regulations (CFR) Annualized GPO edition
Local ordinance El Paso County ordinances
Secondary Sources
Citation Web Location
State digest Colorado Law Digest purchase page
Federal digest US Federal Law Digest purchase page
American Law Reports Lexis signin
Encyclopedia Wex, Legal Information Institute free encyclopedia
State LoisLaw Connect federal + one state ordering page
Corpus Juris Secundum Westlaw signin
Periodicals & treatises Hein Online signin
University of Colorado Law Review
More musings on legal ethics and information technology
Continuing on in the spirit of my post on “The Dream of the Paperless Office”, this is a research piece I did for Computers and the Law as a make-up for assignments that required software inaccessible to students with a used copy of the (exorbitantly expensive) textbook. While I understand that creating a textbook is a time-consuming process (I should know, one of my college courses created a free online textbook as a final project) and the creators deserve to be compensated for their effort, if prices become so steep that only a few students in the class can stretch their budget to accommodate a new copy of the course text, the publisher’s bottom line is still going to hurt. With free options like Coursera and Open University growing by leaps and bounds, publishers need to rethink their business models from the ground up or risk becoming obsolete.
The Dream of the Paperless Office
With my background in information science (I worked in libraries for several years before shifting to focus more on administration and legal writing), this assignment for Introduction to Law was a blast from the past.
The dream of the paperless office has been around since at least the late 1970s and, like Chinese democracy, always seems to be ten years away. The rise of broadband modems, wireless internet, and affordable electronic storage may mean that soon we really will hit a record low in office paper consumption…although as an archivist and thus a professional musty paper enthusiast I seriously doubt that our society will ever go truly paperless. “Different technologies have different affordances”, as my iSchool professors used to say. The physicality and scribblability of paper are just better for a certain subset of tasks, just as the accessibility and duplicability of electronic documents are just better for others.
I’m still very glad my parents paid for those touch-typing lessons back in grade school, though.
Legal (Para)Eagle: Kimberley Hoff's legal blog 