Legal Citation Hackathon, 13 September 2014: Results, storify, links, and resources

Legal Citation Hackathon was held 13 September 2014 at Fastcase, in Washington, DC.

The event was organized by DC Legal Hackers.

Projects and datasets worked on at the hackathon are listed at: https://github.com/dclegalhackers/citation-hackathon

One Twitter hashtag for the event was #legalhack

Click here for a storify of Twitter tweets and photos from the event.

Here are some results of the hackathon, many of which deal with the Fastcase Public API, described here by Joshua Auriemma:

• Joshua Auriemma wrote a series of regular expressions for legal citation extraction
• Ben Dixon wrote a “simple wrapper [a Ruby gem] around the Fastcase API” (HT @adelevie)
• V. David Zvenyach, Alan deLevie, and Ben Dixon worked on David’s Permafrast, “a human-centric wrapper around the Fastcase Public API” [code is here on GitHub]
• “legalmarkdown.com now allows automatic links to reported judicial opinions,” owing to Permafrast (HT @vdavez)
• Sam Glover said he would use Permafrast to develop a WordPress plugin for the Fastcase Public API

Here is a description of the event, from the event’s Website:

[...] The hackathon will present a unique problem (here: Legal Citation) for legal hackers to solve, with topics ranging from current policy debates to the role of technology in legal practice and policymaking. During the legal hackathon, the teams will work together on a tech- or policy-based solution to the issue presented. Although you don’t have to be a coder to participate, we strongly encourage non-tech participants to work together with coders on their “legal hacks.”

What will be “hacked” on?

• Improving citation parsers (such as github.com/unitedstates/citation)
• Building applications that use the parsers (such as github.com/adelevie/downlaw)
• Anything else! If you’re generally interested in legal hacking, but not in legal citations, please attend! We’re happy to facilitate collaboration between lawyers and coders.

SCHEDULE:

9:30 – 10 Breakfast

10 – 12 Hacking

12 – 12:30 Lunch

12:30 – 4:00 Continued Hacking

After: drinks, pats on backs, better citation technology [...]

Follow along on twitter with the hashtag #LegalHack or at www.twitter.com/DCLegalHackers [...]

For more details, please see the event’s Website.

Click here for information on other recent or upcoming legal hacking events.

HT @DCLegalHackers