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LAWVIS Summary
Legal education and practice are verbal in nature, with written text the primary presentation method common to both. Law students are rarely given the opportunity to develop skills to represent legal concepts using images or graphics, and in practice it is the expert witness more often than the lawyer who presents visual artefacts to the court. The law is a complex ecosystem, rife with ambiguity and discord such that it can be difficult to know how it works, which legislation should be applied, and in some cases whether a defendant’s action was even morally wrong. Visual representation can aid those engaging with the law to organise, understand, improve collaboration and aid recall of complicated legal concepts has been understood for many years. Legal visualisations can reduce confusion and miscomprehension for professional and lay-person alike, giving rise to a potential for preventing faulty decision-making and avoiding or mitigating errors and the significant costs associated with relitigating matters. This work investigates the use of flowcharts and similar process-oriented diagrams to describe legislation or legal practice processes, seeking whether, how, and to what degree information visualisation techniques are being applied in contemporary legal literature and practice.
The Lawmap is one approach to information visualisation (infovis) for the legal domain that can equally represent both the implicit structure of legislation and the stepwise nature of lawyerly processes. Lawmaps present as an escalating set of levels shown in the above diagram that begin with: (1) The Core - the primary steps described in the legislation or performed by the lawyer when engaged in work on behalf of their client; (2) The Second Level - the processes performed to complete an activity described in the core level; (3) The Optional Level - An additional layer of sub-processes that feed back into second level activities; and (4) The Data Layer - describes the legislation or case law, data sources and their contents, and other knowledge required for or created on completing the activity or process described at that step in the lawmap. Together, these four levels constitute the completed Lawmap.
LAWVIS Details
Law and Legal Process Visualisations
MULTILEVEL: Identifying, Validating and Registering an Easement
Lawmaps Presentation: Lawmaps Talk presented to the LAIV/AISEC group
CONVEYANCING
LEASES
PROPERTY SEARCHES
EASEMENTS
FREEHOLD and LEASEHOLD
LAWVIS PUBLICATIONS
Impact
The social and economic costs of poor decision making in critical areas are enormous and growing. In the Justice System, between 2014-15, the UK Criminal Cases Review Commission reported over 1500 cases of appeal, with 95,000 successful appeals against criminal conviction in the last two decades. Between 2010-16, 22% of cases at the Court of Appeal were deemed unsafe because of misleading criminal evidence in the original trial. A 2016 US report on criminal injustice from 700 cases, cited the cost of over 200 thousand years to human life and $282m to the economy. In Health and Social Care, a 2014 Dept of Health report claimed £1-2.5bn wasted by NHS on preventable errors, with medication errors contributing to 22,000 deaths a year. Ofsted had recently identified that too many vulnerable children face "clear and present risk of harm" due to failings from child protection departments
The Brave Centre will have a long term transformational impact on the way interdisciplinary reasoning is done in areas critical to public interest. Its practical toolkit for evidence based decision-making will ensure misalignments of goals and values are minimized so that more appropriate decisions for the public good are made. It will thereby deliver major social and economic benefits from the sounder decision making that results. Impact from Brave's research will be instrumental in influencing the development of policy, practice and service provision, shaping legislation, and altering future workplace behaviour in decision making.
Poor decision making from large organisations, government and the justice system impact almost everybody. While the Centre focus is on law, health, intelligence analysis, and forensics, the methods naturally extend to other critical domains (education, environment etc). So, BRAVE has the long-term potential to benefit all of society. Moreover, BRAVE has created the mechanism to ensure such impact, as it has already obtained commitments from multiple influential stakeholders and decision-makers across all areas of public life (including MPs, MEPs, Lords, CEOs of major organisations, high court judges, senior Government advisors, surgeons and the world's leading scholars In reasoning, decision-making and risk) - all named in the proposal (BRAVE already has a website www.mclachlandigital.com/brave with a 'call to action' inviting new members to get involved). In the shorter-term, because of the involvement of such stakeholders, the following will all benefit from the availability of the BRAVE toolkit to support decision-making:
Regulatory bodies: Food Health (National Institute of Clinical Excellence, Medicines & healthcare products regulatory authority, European Medicines Agency)
Government:MPs, Civil Servants, Fire Services, Military & Police, Transportation, urban planning, telecommunication, social welfare & NHS, Energy infrastructure.
Local Authority: Education Providers, roads & transport service providers, environment & waste services
Justice system: The CPS, legal professionals, court officials, forensic scientists, expert witnesses.
Healthcare: Healthcare practitioners, Health service providers, professional services, Quality improvement managers.
Social Care: Care workers,education providers, special needs, mental health & disability services, elderly care, home care and care homes.
There will also be Academic Researchers who benefit from BRAVE's outputs. In particular, those in: statistics (improved methods of hypothesis testing and analysis); psychology (improved methods of experimentation); law and medicine (improved methods of reasoning and decision-making with uncertain evidence and data); and computer science (improved methods and tools for modelling causal relationships and integrating data with expert judgement).
Big Data
Bibliography
About Us
Learn About our Team & Culture.
Lisa Webley
Professor Lisa Webley is Head of Birmingham Law School, University of Birmingham Lisa's BHAM Profile. Lisa’s research concerns the regulation, education and ethicality and professionalism of the legal profession, and broader access to justice and rule of law concerns. Lisa is General Editor of Legal Ethics and Co-Director of the Legal Education Research Network. She holds visiting professorships at the Sir Zelman Cowen Centre at Victoria University Australia and at the University of Portsmouth, and has been a visiting scholar at Melbourne University and Hong Kong University. She holds a Senior Research Fellowship at IALS, University of London. She is co-author (with Harriet Samuels) of the Complete Public Law: Text, Cases and Materials (OUP) and Legal Writing (Routledge). She was awarded the OUP Law Teacher of the Year prize 2016.
Scott McLachlan
Scott McLachlan is a Research Fellow in Law at the Birmingham Law School, University of Birmingham. Scott's Academic Profile. Scott's research interests cover a wide range of the Law and Health Informatics domains, including: legal and medical knowledge engineering and information visualisation; learning health systems; health and legal decision support systems; the legal and ethical perspectives of digital privacy, security and electronic surveillance; health law; data integration, and; human-computer interaction. Scott is a founding member of the Health Informatics and Knowledge Engineering Research (HiKER) Group that has delivered research in the areas of medico-legal decision support, privacy-preservation in the secondary use of electronic patient data and Learning Health Systems. He is also a founding Fellow of the Australasian Institute of Digital Health (FAIDH).
Contact Details
- s.mclachlan@bham.ac.uk
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Scott McLachlan
Birmingham Law School
University of Birmingham