Categories
Ideabook Work Product Tool

Visual, Machine-Readable Legal Briefs

An idea for schematically diagramming a legal brief — to make it more instantly clear what its content is.

Legal Design Idea - Make Briefs more comprehensible with maps and layers

Ideabook - visual legal briefs

Legal Claim Map - Brief Redesign - Ideabook - visual legal briefs

What would a better legal brief look like? What would it be to submit writings for the judge’s consideration in ways that are more formally structured — so that these communications could:

1) be laid out systematically for the judge & her clerks (think in tables or side-by-side comparisons),
2) perhaps even made machine-readable (so that computers could process them and give the judge more ways to read/compare/index them), and
3) be composed by the lawyer/litigant in more straightforward ways (less laboring over blank pages in Microsoft Word, and more using universally accepted templates or forms).

I’ve hinted at this possible redesign in earlier posts – that one after a conversation with a clerk who wished that she could have tools to help her systematically compare & analyze opposing sides’ arguments. Now I’m picking up that conversation after speaking with an appeals court judge from Milan, Italy, who is exploring ways to formalize both judges’ opinions & lawyers’ briefs.

Better modeled legal brief

Formally modeling legal briefs and opinions

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.