Akoma Ntoso, Process, Standards, technology, Transparency

Changing the way the world legislates. Together.

I got my start, like my father before me, as a draftsman. I worked for the Cleveland Switchboard Company drawing power distribution switchboards and panel boards while earning my engineering degree at university. That experience led to me getting a job at the Boeing Company supporting drafting tools as an electronics design engineer.

It was a pivotal time at Boeing, and indeed for the entire industry. When I started, we were supporting drafting tools which used computers to emulate drafting boards. But within a few years, drafting tools gave way to design tools. The reason was simple. Computers enabled a whole different way of thinking. It wasn’t just a matter of putting pencil to paper anymore. Design tools allowed you to use a computer to do the intellectual engineering work behind the schematics that would be produced. My focus shifted from schematic drawings to fault simulations – being able to identify the many ways a system might fail such that those failure modes would never happen (a skill Boeing seems to have lost of late).

The pace of change in legal informatics has been much slower — something that has been frustrating to me. The transformation I witnessed in electronic design today allows me to have a virtual supercomputer in my pocket. It’s time for legislation to make the same leap into the future.

We need to get beyond legislative drafting and rethink the process by which policy initiatives become legislation which ultimately become law. There’s much more to that process than just writing the text for the documents that become bills.

There are many stakeholders in the legislative process – constituents, special interests, politicians, government representatives, and even the lawyers that draft the legislation. Synthesizing all the information they provide into a bill draft is a complex process. This is something I’ve been thinking about for a very long time. In fact, it was realizing that XML was the best medium for transforming the legislative process, in a way like what I had experienced in electronics design, that led me to start Xcential.

We now have the tools, technologies, and the standards to make this transformation a reality. We have tools that allow the lawyers who draft legislation to focus on the intellectual process rather than the technical process of getting the formatting or wording right. We have tools that allow all the stakeholders to work together rather than individually. And we have technologies and standards that ensure the precise representation and handling of the law.

When I left Boeing, I took a job working at a design automation company to revolutionize how engineers work – something we called “concurrent design”. I was the product manager for the design management component at the very heart of that system. The company tagline reflected the vision: “Changing the way the world designs. Together.” It’s time for a such big vision in our field.

Lawsuit, Process, technology, Transparency

Transparent legislation should be easy to read — part II

I have some good news to share. After almost two years under the cloud of litigation regarding a challenge to one of our patent applications, we have reached a settlement that concludes the issue. The Patent Trials and Appeals Board (PTAB) ruled in our favor by denying the patent derivation claim made against us. This was on top of earlier rulings in our favor. What is more, both our patent applications have now been allowed.

While the terms of the settlement remain confidential, this has been a costly exercise for us. For me personally, this was very difficult. Not only did I have to defend my honor and integrity, but I have had to spend half of my personal life savings in the defense of Xcential – with no guarantees that I will ever be able to recoup that expense. Using my own savings for a lot of the legal bills was the only way to ensure that Xcential would be able to go on. This has certainly affected my life.

If there is something good to come out of this exercise, it is validation that we’re onto something very valuable. With the litigation behind us and both patents in our pocket, we are now able to proceed forward with our plans to serve our markets – selectively, of course,

Over a decade ago, I wrote a blog questioning why federal bills are written the way they are. For someone experienced with state legislation, federal legislation is quite cryptic and difficult to understand. It turns out that the style of amending law found in federal legislation is the common form and can be found around the world. In the U.S. Congress, this style is known as cut and bite¹ amending. With this style, individual word changes are spelled out in a narrative form. For example, here is a section from California Assembly Bill 2748 from the current session:

SECTION 1. Section 21377.5 of the Water Code is amended to read:

21377.5. (a) Notwithstanding Section 21377 of this code or Section 54954 of the Government Code or any other provision of law, the Board of Directors of the Tri-Dam Project, which is composed of the directors of the Oakdale Irrigation District and the South San Joaquin Irrigation District, may hold no more than four regular meetings annually at ~~the~~ a Tri-Dam Project ~~offices. The Board of Directors of the Tri-Dam Project shall adopt a resolution that determines the location of the Tri-Dam Project offices.~~ office that is located in Sonora, California, or Strawberry, California, or within 30 miles of either city.

(b) The notice and conduct of these meetings shall comply with the provisions of the Ralph M. Brown Act (Chapter 9 (commencing with Section 54950) of Part 1 of Division 2 of Title 5 of the Government Code).

You can clearly see what changes are being made. However, if written using cut and bite amending, this equivalent section would read something like:

SECTION 1. Section 21377.5 of the Water Code is amended by:

(a) Deleting the sixth “the” and replacing it with “a”.

(b) After “Tri-Dam Project”, deleting to the end of the subsection and replacing with “office that is located in Sonora, California, or Strawberry, California, or within 30 miles of either city.”

This very terse form of amendment gives no context for the change being made. The change in subsection (a) is completely meaningless without any context. What this all means is that a politician tasked with approving these changes must do a significant amount of work to understand what the changes are all about and why they are being made.

Back in 2013, I questioned why the form found most of the U.S. states including my state of California wasn’t used. As seen in the example above, the U.S. states use a different approach to amending – known as amending in full. In this style of amending, the entire section containing the change is restated and the change is shown (some of the time) as stricken and inserted text, as you would find with track changes in a word processor. This approach has the benefit of making the change much clearer by providing the complete context of the change. In California, this approach is mandated by the State Constitution as amended by Proposition 1-a of 1966. This proposition was overwhelmingly approved by the voters of California. The Speaker of the California Assembly at the time, Jesse Unruh, had pushed through this constitutional amendment to establish professional legislature less beholden to special interests that other pressures that were undermining the effectiveness of the legislature at the time. His reforms were quite sweeping. Among the many changes, one part of this initiative was to make legislation more transparent.

The specific provision that was added, Section 9 of Article IV of the California Constitution, reads:

“A statute shall embrace but one subject, which shall be expressed in its title. If a statute embraces a subject not expressed in its title, only the part not expressed is void. A statute may not be amended by reference to its title. A section of a statute may not be amended unless the section is re-enacted as amended.”

This section of the California Constitution contains two rules. The first is the single subject rule, which limits the scope of each statute. The second is the re-enactment rule, which mandates the amendment in full approach, requiring that each section amended by re-enacting the whole section (essentially a repeal of the prior section and enactment of a new amended section as a single action). Most U.S. states have these same rules or very similar rules. These two rules go together. One of the worries of the re-enactment rule is that, by opening an entire section for re-enactment, unwelcome amendments might be added as part of the political process of winning votes. The single-subject rule is a guard against that behavior.

At the time of my original blog, I learned that adopting these rules in Congress would be impossible. For one thing, the U.S. Code is less regular than state codes or revised statutes, especially in the non-positive titles, and that re-enacting an entire section would be quite complex and could cause other difficulties. Re-enactment rules require consistently bite-sized sections. In addition, the House’s equivalent of the single subject rule, the germaneness rule adopted in 1789, didn’t have quite the same effectiveness as the single subject rule of California. Apparently, the Senate’s equivalent rules, found in the Senate Standing Rule XVI and Rule XXII had even more limited applicability.

As a result, I proposed in my blog that amendments in context be used. With amendments in context, a proposed bill is drafted using the amendments in full style that U.S. states use, from which a cut and bite style bill is generated using automation. With this approach, you get the best of both worlds. The bill is drafted in a form that is easy to understand and easy to manage while the worries of unleashing this amending style are circumvented by retaining the existing amending style for parliamentary procedures. However, at the time, the technology just wasn’t available. Under contract to the Law Revision Counsel, Xcential was just beginning down the path of converting the U.S. Code to processable XML that could feed the automation tools. While we had tools to offer that could do amendments in context, we were constrained by our agreement with California as to how much of our technology could be reused – they had been worried we could inadvertently undermine the successes of Proposition 1-a by empowering the special interests with our technology.

Today, more than a decade later, much has changed. The U.S. Code is available in an XML format we designed and a new more modern LegisPro is available that is both web-based and much more powerful than what we had back then. But there have been other changes too. The Posey Rule has been adopted requiring that a comparative print be provided alongside all proposed law showing how the law will be affected. This comparative print is also generated by Xcential technology and alleviates much of the problem by allowing politicians to understand more easily what it is they are voting on. However, it leaves the complexity of drafting and managing the process of creating and managing the cut-and-bite amendments still to be addressed.

This problem isn’t limited to U.S. federal bills. It’s a common problem wherever cut and bite amending is employed, particularly in Commonwealth countrie or countries with Westminster based legislative traditions, even if the term cut and bite isn’t used.

At Xcential, we’re going to return to our core mission – to make government processes better through technology. Our goal is improved efficiency, increased accuracy, and most importantly, better transparency for the benefit of the citizens.

The term cut and bite is also sometimes used to refer to the form of amending used to propose amendments to bills themselves. Another term for these types of bill amendments are page and line amendments as they usually are expressed as references to page and line numbers rather than to provisions. ↩︎

Lawsuit, technology, Track Changes, Transparency

Lawsuit Update and a Tale about Bicycles

In the past couple weeks, the first two court rulings have come out concerning our battle with the Akin Gump law firm. Both rulings have been in our favor. The first ruling denied Akin Gump’s motion to dismiss, instead allowing four of the five claims in our countersuit – with the judge calling them “plausible”. The second ruling denied Akin Gump’s attempt at a preliminary injunction to stop us from responding to actions from the U.S. Patent Office. The judge found that “there is not a substantial likelihood that (Akin Gump) will prevail,.” She then added “(T)o preclude Xcential from moving forward…would discourage invention, it would discourage innovation, it would discourage companies from investing their own resources to try to come up with workable solutions to commonly identified problems,.”

After reading the transcript, I have an interesting analogy to make. It is based on an analogy that the Akin Gump attorney chose to use – comparing our dispute to that of inventing a bicycle. While it’s not a perfect analogy, it is still a very good analogy.

Imagine you have an idea for a two-wheeled mode of transportation that will help you do your job more effectively. You discover that this idea is called a bicycle and that there are several bicycle manufacturers already – so you approach one to see if their product can do the job. While this company did not invent the bicycle, they specialize in making them and have been doing so for many years. This company only make bicycles. They are not the manufacturer of the commodity materials that make up a bicycle such as the metal tubing or even the tools that bend the tubes to make handlebars. While not a household name, they are very well known among bicycle enthusiasts around the world.

However, you discover that there is a problem. In the highly regulated world of bicycles (maybe automobiles would have been a better analogy), this bicycle maker doesn’t have a bicycle that conforms to your local regulatory market. You have a quick 30-minute call with the bicycle maker, and they say they’re familiar with the regulations in your market, but that making the changes your local regulations require and getting those changes certified is a costly business and is only done for customers willing to help foot the bill. You indicate that you’re still interested and accept their suggestion that they build a prototype, at no charge, of the bicycle that is suitable for your regulatory market. You send them a hand drawn map of the routes you want to ride the bicycle on so that they can understand the regulatory concerns that might apply.

With the suggestion of funding, the bicycle maker goes off starts building a demonstrable prototype of a modified bicycle model that conforms to your local regulatory requirements. As a potential customer for this localized version of the bicycle, you get limited updates from the salesperson you were working with to ensure that you’re still interested and to indicate that the prototype hasn’t been forgotten. He makes a point of buttering you up, as salespeople are wont to do. You never interact with the engineers building the prototype at all.

It turns out that the regulations require mudguards over the wheels and reflectors on the front and rear. In the process of attaching these parts, the engineers at the bicycle company come up with some nifty brackets for attaching the mudguards and reflectors to the bicycle frame in accordance with the regulatory requirements. While the mudguards and reflectors are commodities, the brackets used to attach them are novel, so the engineers apply for patent protection for these brackets. You play no role in the design or manufacture of these brackets.

When the bicycle maker brings their modified bicycle to your office to show you what can be done, you’re wowed by the result, but don’t really have the budget to help cover the cost of getting the changes certified. The bicycle company shelves the project without a paying customer.

Later on, while pondering whether to patent your idea for a bicycle, you come across the bicycle maker’s patent application. Without much of an understanding into the making of bicycles, you conflate the general idea for a bicycle (it was invented decades earlier and is prior art at this point), a bicycle that is adapted to your regulatory market (not something that is patentable), and the nifty brackets that hold the reflectors and mudguards on the frame and are necessary to achieve regulatory compliance in your local market (and that you played no part in designing or manufacturing – but are patentable).

technology, Track Changes, Transparency, Uncategorized

Xcential in Litigation with Akin Gump Law Firm

As many of you know by now, Xcential and I have been placed in an unfortunate position of having to deal with litigation with a large Washington D.C. lobbying firm, Akin Gump. We have been getting a lot of press, and I feel it is my duty to explain the situation as best I can.

Back in late 2018, Xcential was approached by an attorney at Akin Gump interested in applying our bill drafting and amending application, LegisPro, to improve the process of drafting and amending federal legislation. Initially, he was interested in using LegisPro to generate a bill amendment. This eventually evolved into an investigation into whether LegisPro could generate a federal amending bill from an in-context marked up copy of the law itself. The Akin Gump attorney expressed frustration at having to type, in narrative format, the proposed changes to a federal bill, and sought a simpler solution.

Amending law in context was a use case for LegisPro’s amendment generating capabilities that we had long anticipated. I had even written a blog exploring the idea of amendments-in-context in 2013 which got a lot of coverage on Chris Dorobeck’s podcast and at govloop. I have long made a habit of reporting on the developments in the Legal informatics industry and the work I do at my Legix.info blog including this blog post from April 2018 which describes LegisPro’s feature set at that time.

First a little explanation about how LegisPro is configured to work. As there is no universal way to draft and amend legislation, we must build a custom document model that configures LegisPro for each jurisdiction we work with. Legislation, particularly at the federal level, is complex so this is a substantial task. The customer usually pays for this effort. For the federal government, we did have document models for parts of LegisPro, but they were specific to different use cases and belonged to the federal government, not Xcential. We were not entitled to use these configurations, or any part of them, outside the federal government. This means that, out-of-the-box, LegisPro was not tailored for federal legislation in a way that we could share with Akin Gump. We would have to build a new custom document model to configure LegisPro to draft federal legislation for them.

Once the attorney had had an opportunity to try out a trial version of LegisPro using an account we had provided, we had a meeting during May of 2019. To provide clarity to the conversation as our terminology and his were different, I introduced the terms amending-in-full, cut-and-bite amendments, and amendments-in-context to the Akin Gump attorney. This is the terminology we use in the legal informatics industry to describe these concepts. Seeing the attorney’s enthusiasm towards addressing the problem and being convinced this was a true sales opportunity, I said I would find the time to build a small proof of concept to show how LegisPro’s existing cut-and-bite amendment generator would be configured to generate federal style amendments. I had previously arranged to have a partial conversion of a part of the U.S. Code done by a contractor to support Akin Gump’s trial usage of LegisPro. In the months that followed and using this U.S. Code data set, I set about configuring LegisPro to the task, much of it on my own personal time. Akin Gump did not cover the cost of any of this including my time or the contractor’s fees.

I flew to Washington D.C. for an August 29^th, 2019 meeting in the attorney’s office to deliver the demonstration of a working application in person. He was duly impressed and kept exclaiming “Holy S###” over and over. We explained that this was just a proof of concept and that we could build out a complete system using a custom document model for federal legislation. He had already explained that the cost for a custom document model was probably out of reach for Akin Gump, so we should consider the implementation as an Xcential product rather than a custom application for Akin Gump. We considered this approach and our offer to implement a solution was a very small percentage of what the real cost would be. We would need to find many more customers on K Street to cover the development cost of a non-government federal document model. He had explained this approach would earn Xcential a “K Street parade,” a term we used to describe the potential project of building a federal document model to be sold on K Street

As it turns out, even our modest offer of about $1,000 to $2,000 per seat (depending on various choices) and a range of $50,000 to $175,000 for a custom document model and other services was too much for Akin Gump, and they walked away. Our 2019 pricing sheet clearly mentioned that the per seat prices did not include the cost for document conversion or configuration/customization and that a custom document model might be required for an additional fee. Furthermore, we had discussed the need for this custom work on several occasions. Our offer was more than fair as building these systems typically runs into the millions of dollars. Despite considerable costs to us in terms of my time, the use of a contractor, and travel to Washington D.C., we were never under any obligation to deliver anything to Akin Gump, and Akin Gump never paid us anything.

In the process of configuring LegisPro to generate federal amending bills, I came up with some implementation changes to the core product which we felt were novel. They built on a mechanism we had already built for a different project and for which we had separately applied for a patent a year earlier. We went ahead and filed for a patent for those changes, describing the overall processing model using a term I coined called “bill synthesis,” echoing my experience with logic synthesis earlier in my career from which I had drawn inspiration.

Two and a half years later, we learned that Akin Gump had filed a complaint to assume ownership of our patent application. This made no sense at all as our patent application is very implementation specific to LegisPro’s inner workings. The Akin Gump attorney involved had played no part in the design or coding of these details. What he had done was to describe his frustrations with the federal bill drafting use case to us – something we had long been aware of. He was simply asking us for a solution to a problem that was widely known in the industry and previously known to us.

When I got to see the assertions that Akin Gump makes in its court filings, I was astonished by their breadth. Rather than technical details, the assertions are all high-level ideas, insisting that an idea for an innovation the attorney had conceived of in the summer of 2018 is the “proverbial ‘holy grail’” to the legislative drafting industry. However, this innovative idea, as described in the complaint, is an application that closely resembles LegisPro as he would have experienced it during his trial usage in early 2019, including descriptions of key services and user interface features that have long existed.

What does not get any mention in Akin Gump’s filings are the details of our implementation for which we have based our patent claims — around document assembly and change sets. This is not surprising. The attorney is not a software developer and Akin Gump is not a software firm, it is a law firm. Neither he nor the firm have any qualifications in the realm of complex software development.

I can appreciate the attorney’s enthusiasm. When I came across the subject back in 2001, I was so enthusiastic that I started a company around it.

But for me, this is very hurtful. I worked hard, much of it on my own time over summer to build the proof of concept for Akin Gump. Yet I am portrayed in a most unflattering way. While I recall a cordial working arrangement throughout the effort, that is not how Akin Gump’s complaint reads. There is no appreciation for the complexity of writing or even configuring software to draft and amend legislation. The attorney forgets to mention that I succeeded in demonstrating a working application in the form of proof of concept on August 29^th in his office. There is no understanding of the deep expertise that I brought to the table. The value of the time that I had spent on this project already was likely worth more than the amount we asked from Akin Gump to deliver a solution.

I wake up many nights angry at what this has come to. We work hard to make our customers happy and to do so at a very fair price. We are a small company, based in San Diego, and having to defend ourselves against the accusations of a wealthy law firm is a costly and frustrating undertaking that distracts from our mission.

What is ironic is that, by taking a litigation route to claim a patent, Akin Gump has all but closed off any likelihood of ever having the capability. There are few software firms in the world capable of creating such a system. In the U.S. I only know of a couple, none of which have the experience and products which Xcential can bring to bear. For this solution to ever see the light of day at the federal level, it is going to take a substantial effort, with many trusted parties working collaboratively.

I once had a boss who would often say “when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.” Just because you have something in your toolbox, you should choose wisely if using it is the right course of action. For a law firm, litigation is an easy tool to reach for. But is it the right tool?

Process, technology

Building an Agile Team

We’ve recently built our first true Agile development team. It’s been quite a learning experience, but now we’re seeing the results.

At Xcential, we have lots of waterfall process experience. Our backgrounds come from big waterfall companies like Boeing and Xerox. Over the years we’ve worked on very large projects in very traditional ways. In more recent years, we’ve also had a few Agile projects, largely initiated by customers, that have been good training grounds for us — for better or worse.

Like many companies, in recent years we’ve fallen victim to what the U.S. Department of Defense calls Agile BS — when you apply Agile terminology to your existing way of doing business. It’s a way to dilute Agile and turn it into nothing but a series of buzzwords. We’ve had sprints, standups, product owners, backlogs, and all the other bits of Agile — but we haven’t had the mindset that is necessary to make the Agile process work.

To build an Agile Team, we have needed to make a few key changes. First, we had assemble a team of developers who would gel together to become a performing team as fast as possible. Then, in order to overcome the inertia of the old way of doing things, we had to ensure that the team was trained to tackle the challenge in front of them. Finally, we have had to ensure that all the team members felt empowered to rise up and take ownership for their project.

An Agile team must be self-managing. This means that all the team members must feel the responsibility to deliver and have a commitment to do their part. Getting to that point has been a challenge — from getting management to let go and trust the team to getting the team members to step up and trust that their responsibilities are real.

I like to think of managing a team as being a game of chess. In a traditional arrangement, the managers are the back row while the developers and the interchangeable pawns in the front row — to be assigned here, there and everywhere.

In an Agile team, the roles are different. The team is self-managing. There is no front row and back row. Everyone has an important role in the team. This means that everyone should be challenged to step up to a bigger role than they would have had in a traditional team. While some team members are timid at first, having everyone feel empowered to play an important role is a key to the success of Agile.

We still have some challenges. Developers are still bouncing from one project to another. This discontinuity of effort shows as a reluctance to commit to the story points that will ultimately be necessary to complete the project in a timely way. It also distracts from our efforts to form team bonds. It’s hard to consider the team your home team when you’re feeling like a visitor to every team you work on.

Nonetheless, we’re starting to see real results from our prototype Agile team. Continuous integration procedures have been put in place ensuring a “done” product increment at the end of each sprint. For various reasons, delivery of these iterations to customers have not yet started, but this will be rectified at the end of the next sprint. We have peer reviews which are both improving the quality of the product with providing some degree of cross-training. The team’s velocity is improving, albeit at a slow rate. Over the next few sprints we will start integrating more and more with the other projects — and hopefully drawing them all into our new and more efficient way of building software.

Process, technology, Uncategorized

GitHub Copilot — Is it the future?

Several months ago, I got admitted to the GitHub Copilot preview. For those of you who don’t know what Copilot is, it’s a AI-based plugin to Visual Studio Code that helps you by suggesting code for you to type. If you like, the suggestion, you hit tab, and on you go.

Join the GitHub Copilot waitlist · GitHub

It may sound like magic, and in some ways, it does seem like that. Apparently, it learns the vast base of open-source code found in the GitHub repositories. This, of course, has led to the inevitable charges that it violates fair use of that code and even that it will ultimately replace developer’s jobs much as factory automation has replaced workers. From my experience, this is more about sensationalism than anything real to worry about.

In my recent posts, I’ve covered the DIKW pyramid. It seems we’ve been stuck in the information layer for a long time, only barely touching the knowledge layer in very rudimentary ways. Yes, there are tools like Siri and Alexa which claim to be AI-based virtual assistants, but they just feel like a whole bunch or complicated programming to achieve something that is more annoying than helpful. There is Tesla Copilot for self-driving cars, but that just seems scary to me. (Full disclosure: I don’t even trust cruise control) To me, GitHub copilot is the first piece of software that truly seems to drive deep into the knowledge layer and even reach the wisdom layer. It’s truly simulating some sort of real smartness.

While the sensationalists love to make it seem that Copilot is lifting code from other people’s work and offering it up as a suggestion, I’ve seen nothing whatsoever that suggests that that is what it is doing. Instead, it truly seems to understand what I am doing. It makes suggestions that could only come from my code. It uses my naming conventions, coding standards, and even my coding style. It seems to have analyzed enough of the code base in my application to understand what local functions and libraries it could draw upon. The code it synthesizes are obviously built on templates that it’s derived by learning. But those templates aren’t just copies of other people’s work. This is how synthesis works in the CAD world I come from (actually, it’s a bit more sophisticated that the synthesis I knew in CAD many years ago) and this is a natural next step in coding technologies.

I’ve been experimenting with what Copilot can do — how far reaching its learning seems to be. It’s able to help me writing JavaScript. What it is able to suggest is remarkable. However, coding assistance is not its only trick. It even helps with writing comments — sometimes with a bit of an attitude too. Last week I was adding a TODO: comment into the loader part of LegisPro to note that it needed to be modernized. Copilot’s unsolicited suggestion for my comment was “Replace the loader with a real loader”. Thanks Copilot. As Han Solo once said, “I’m not really interested in your opinion 3PO”.

Of course, this all leads to the inevitable question. Can it be trained to write legislation? Much to my surprise, it seemingly can. How and why it knows this is completely unknown to me. It’s able to suggest basic amending language and seems to know enough that it can use fragments of quotes from Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin. I find it incredible that it can even understand the context of legislation and that I did not have to tell it what that context was.

So am I sold on this new technology? Well, yes and no.

It’s not the scary source code stealing and eavesdropping application some would make it out to be. The biggest drawback to it is the same reason I don’t even trust cruise control in my car. It’s not that I don’t trust the computer. It’s that I don’t trust myself to not become lazy and complacent and come to believe the computer is right. I’ve already come across a number of situations where I’ve accepted Copilot’s suggestion without too much thought, only to needlessly wasting hours tracking down a problem that would never have existed if I had actually taken the time to write the code.

It’s an interesting technology, and I believe it’s going to be am important part of how software development evolves in the coming years. But as with all new technologies, it must be adopted with caution.

Akoma Ntoso, Standards, technology, Uncategorized

What is Good Legislative XML?

I’m often asked what make on XML model better than another when it comes to representing laws and regulations. Just because a document is modeled in XML does not mean that it is useful in that form — the design of the schema matters in terms of what it enables or facilitates.

We have a few rules of thumb that we apply when either designing or adopting an XML schema:

Is it semantic?
Reason: In order to process the information in a document, you have to understand what it is and what it means.
Is the presentation separated from the semantics as much as possible?
Reason: We have moved beyond paper and nowadays it’s important to present information in form factors that just don’t suit the legacy constraints imposed by printing paper.
Is all the text (excluding any metadata section) in the natural reading order?
Reason: The simplest way to present and process the text in a document is in the reading order of the text. This is particularly important is the presentation is to be added to the XML using simple CSS styling (as opposed to HTML transformation) and when the text is subject to complex amending instructions.
Does it, to the fullest extent possible, avoid the use of generated text?
Reason: Similar to the last rule, it’s important for text to be displayed or amended when that text is represented. Generating text opens up a can of worms which can require sophisticated additional processing. Also, from a historical record of the text, which is essential for enacted law, having part of the text be generated by an external algorithm requires that the algorithm itself become part of the permanent record.
Is every provision that needs data associated with it permanently identifiable?
Reason: With modern automation comes the need to not only manage the text of a provision but also state information. For example, is the current status of the provision pending, effective, repealed, or spent? While some of the metadata might be stored with the XML representation of the provision itself, sometimes it is better to store that metadata in a separate part of the document or in an external database. In these cases, it’s important to be able to permanently associate this external metadata with the provision — and this usually requires an immutable (permanent) identifier.
Is every provision that is referred to easily locatable?
Reason: Laws are full of references (or citations). These are to provisions within the same document or to other documents or provisions within those documents. There needs to be a way to accurately and efficiently traverse and process these references. This need usually requires a locating identifier that an unambiguously identify the provision being referred to.
If the XML schema is for general use, is there an extensible way to add missing constructs?
Reason: It is easy to claim to support all the legal traditions in the word, but extremely difficult to do so. While legal traditions are remarkably similar around the world, it’s impossible to predict every single construct that will arise — especially with documents data back hundreds of years. There has to be a way to implement constructs that don’t intrinsically exist within the base XML schema.
Is there an extensible metadata mechanism?
Reason: A primary objective for representing a legislative or regulatory document in XML is for the processability it enables. This invariably means a need to record extensive metadata about the provisions found within the document. As the automation possibilities are endless, there needs to be a way to model and record the metadata that is generated.
Does it provide the facilities necessary to automate according to modern expectations?
Reason: Some structure facilitate automation while others do not. For instance, flat structures can simplify the drafting process, but also make the automation process more difficult. It’s usually better to implement hierarchical structures and then hide the drafting complexity that creates with richer tools.

Process, technology, Track Changes

Moving on Up to Document Synthesis

In my last blog, I discussed the DIKW pyramid and how the CAD world has advanced through the layers while the legal profession was going much slower. I mentioned that design synthesis was my boss Jerry’s favorite topic. We would spend hours at his desk in the evening while he described his vision for design synthesis — which would become the norm in just a few years.

Jerry’s definition of design (or document) synthesis was quite simple — it was the processing of the information found in one document to produce or update another document where that processing was not simple translation. In the world of electronic design, this meant writing a document that described the intended behavior of a circuit and then having a program that would create a manufacturable design using transistors, capacitors, resistors, etc. from the behavioral description. In the software world, we’ve been using this same process for years, writing software in a high-level language and then compiling that description into machine code or bytecode. For hardware design, this was a huge change — moving away from the visual representation of a schematic to a language-based representation similar to a programming language.

In the field of legal informatics, we already see a lot of processes that touch on Jerry’s definition of document synthesis. Twenty years ago, it was seeing how automatable legislation could be, but wasn’t, that convinced me that this field was ready for my skills.

So what processing do we have that meets this definition of document synthesis:

In-context amending is the most obvious process. Being able to process changes recorded in a marked up proposed version of a bill to extract and produce a separate amending document
Automated engrossing is the opposite process — taking the amending instructions found in one document to automatically update the target document.
Code compilation or statute consolidation is another very similar process, applying amending language found in the language of a newly enacted law to update pre-existing law.
Bill synthesis is a new field we’ve been exploring, allowing categorized changes to the law to be made in context and then using those changes and related metadata to produce bills shaped by the categorization metadata provided.
Automated production of supporting documents from legislation or regulations. This includes producing documents such as proclamations which largely reflect the information found within newly enacted laws. As sections or regulations come into effect, proclamations are automatically published enumerating those changes.

In the CAD world, the move to design synthesis required letting go of the visually rich but semantically poor schematic in favor of language-based techniques. Initially there was a lot of resistance to the idea that there would no longer be a schematic. While at University, I had worked as a draftsman and even my dad had started his career as a draftsman, so even I had a bit of a problem with that. But the benefits of having a rich semantic representation that could be processed quickly outweighed the loss of the schematic.

Now, the legislative field is wrestling with the same dilemma — separating the visual presentation of the law, whether on paper or in a PDF, from the semantic meaning found within it. Just as with CAD, it’s a necessary step. The ability to process the information automatically dramatically increases the speed, accuracy, and volume of documents that can be processed — allowing information to be produced and delivered in a timely manner. In our society where instant delivery has become the norm, this is now a requirement.

Process, technology, Uncategorized

The Knowledge Pyramid

At the very start of my career at the Boeing Company, my boss Jerry introduced the Knowledge Pyramid the DIKW Pyramid to me one evening. I had an insatiable thirst for learning and he would spend hours introducing me to ideas he thought I could benefit from. To me, this was a profound bit of learning that would somewhat shape my career.

At the time, I was working in CAD support, introducing automation technologies to the various engineering project’s around the Boeing Aerospace division. The new CAD tools were running on expensive engineering workstations and were replacing largely homegrown minicomputer software from the 1970’s.

Jerry explained to me that the legacy software, largely batch tools, that crunched data manually input from drawings represented the data layer. The CAD drawings our tools produced actually represented a digital representation of the designs with sufficient information for both detailed analysis and manufacturing. It would take a generation of new technologies to advance from one layer to the next in the DIKW pyramid — with each generation lasting from ten to twenty years. His interest was in accelerating that pace and so we studied, as part of our R&D budget, artificial intelligence, expert systems, language-based design techniques, and design synthesis.

While data was all about crunching numbers, information was all about understanding the meaning of the data. Knowledge came from being able to use the information to synthesize (Jerry’s favorite topic) new information and to gain understanding. And finally, wisdom came from being able to work predictively based on that understanding.

When I was introduced to legal informatics in the year 2000, it was a bit of a time warp to me. While the CAD world had advanced considerably and even design synthesis was now the norm, legal informatics was stuck in neutral in the data processing world of the late 1970s and early 1980s. Mainframe tools, green screen editors, and data entry was still the norm. It was seeing this that gave me the impetus to work to advance the legal field. The journey I had just taken in the CAD world of the prior 15 years was yet to be taken in the legal field. The transition into information processing was to start with the migration to XML — replacing the crude formatting oriented markup used in the mainframe tools with modern semantic markup that provided for a much better understanding of the meaning of the text.

To say the migration to the future has gone slowly would be an understatement. There are many reasons why this has happened:

The legacy base of laws have to be carried along — unchanged in virtually every way. This would be like asking Boeing to advance their design tools while at the same time requiring that every other aircraft design ever produced by the company in the prior century also be supported. For law, it a necessary constraint, but also a tremendous burden.
The processes of law are bound by hard-to-change traditions, sometimes enshrined by the constitution of that jurisdiction. This means the tools must adapt more to the existing process than the process can adapt to the tools. Not only does this constraint require incredibly adaptable tools, it is very costly and dampers the progress that can be made.
The legal profession, by and large, is not technology driven and their is little vision into what can be. The pressure to keep things as they are is very strong. In the commercial world, companies simply have to advance or they won’t be competitive and will die. Jurisdictions aren’t in competition with one another and so the need to change is somewhat absent.

For advancements to come their needs to be pressure to change. Some of this does come naturally — the hardware the old tools run on won’t last forever. New legislators entering into their political careers will quickly be frustrated by the archaic paper-inspired approach to automation they find. For instance, viewing a PDF on a smartphone is not the best user experience. It is that smartphone generation that will drive the need to change.

Over the next few blogs, I’m going to explore where legal informatics is on the DIKW pyramid and what advancements on the horizon will move us up to higher levels. I’ll also take a look at new software technologies that point the way to the future — for better or worse.

Akoma Ntoso, HTML5, LegisPro Sunrise, Standards, technology, Track Changes, Uncategorized, W3C

LegisPro Sunrise!!!

LegisPro Sunrise is almost done!. It has taken longer than we had hoped it would, but we are finally getting ready to begin limited distribution of LegisPro Sunrise, our productised implementation of our LegisPro drafting and amending tools for legislation and regulations. If you are interested in participating in our early release program, please contact us at info@xcential.com. If you already signed up, we will be contacting you shortly.

LegisPro Sunrise is a desktop implementation of our web-based drafting and amending products. It uses Electron from GitHub, built from Google’s Chromium project, to bundle all the features we offer, both the client and server sides into a single easy-to-manage desktop application with an installer having auto-update facilities. Right now, the Windows platform is supported, but MacOS and Linux support will be added if the demand is there. You may have already used other Electron applications – Slack, Microsoft’s Visual Studio Code, WordPress, some editions of Skype, and hundreds of other applications now use this innovative new application framework.

Other versions

In addition to the Sunrise edition, we offer LegisPro in customised FastTrack implementations of the LegisPro product or as fully bespoke Enterprise implementations where the individual components can be mixed and matched in many different ways.

Akoma Ntoso model

LegisPro Sunrise comes with a default Akoma Ntoso-based document model that implements the basic constructs seen in many parliaments and legislatures around the world that derive from the Westminster parliamentary traditions.

Document models implementing other parliamentary or regulatory traditions such as those found in many of the U.S. states, in Europe, and in other parts of the world can also be developed using Akoma Ntoso, USLM, or any other well-designed XML legislative schema.

Drafting & Amending

Our focus is on the drafting and amending aspects of the parliamentary process. By taking a digital-first approach to the process, we are able to offer many innovative features that improve and automate the process. Included out of the box is what we call amendments in context where amendment documents are extracted from changes recorded in a target document. Other features can be added through an extensive plugin mechanism.

Basic features

Ease-of-use

While offering sophisticated drafting capabilities for legislative and regulatory documents, LegisPro Sunrise is designed to provide the familiarity and ease-of-use of a word processor. Where it differs is in what happens under the covers. Rather than drafting using a general purpose document model and using styles and formatting to try to capture the semantics, we directly capture the semantic structure of the document in the XML. But don’t worry, as a drafter, you don’t need to know about the underlying XML – that is something for the software developers to worry about.

Templates

Templates allow the boilerplate structure of a document to be instantiated when creating a new document. Out-of-the-box, we are providing generic templates for bills, acts, amendments, amendment lists, and a few other document types.

In addition to document templates, component templates can be specified or are synthesized when necessary to be used as parts when constructing a document.

For both document and component templates, placeholders are used to highlight area where text needs to be provided.

Upload/Download

As a result to our digital-first focus, we manage legislation as information rather than as paper. This distinction is important – the information is held in XML repositories (a form of a database) where we can query, extract, and update provisions at any level of granularity, not just at the document level. However, to allow for the migration from a paper-oriented to a digital first world, we do provide upload and download facilities.

Undo/Redo

As with any good document editor, unlimited undo and redo is supported – going back to the start of the editing session.

Auto-Recovery

Should something go wrong during an editing session and the editor closes, an auto-recovery feature is provided to restore your document to the state the document was at, or close to it, when the editor closed.

Contextual Insert Lists

We provide a directed or “correct-by-construction” approach to drafting. What this means is that the edit commands are driven by an underlying document model that is defined to enforce the drafting conventions. Wherever the cursor is in the document, or whatever is selected, the editor knows what can be done and offers lists of available documents components that can either be inserted at the cursor or around the current selection.

Hierarchy

Document hierarchies form an important part of any legislative or regulatory document. Sometimes the hierarchy is rigid and sometimes it can be quite flexible, but either way, we can support it. The Sunrise edition supports the hierarchy Title > Part > Chapter > Article > Section > Subsection > Paragraph > Subparagraph out of the box, where any level is optional. In addition, we provide support for cross headings which act as dividers rather than hierarchy in the document. Customised versions of LegisPro can support whatever hierarchy you need — to any degree of enforcement. A configurable promote/demote mechanism allows any level to be morphed into other levels up and down the hierarchy.

Large document support

Rule-making documents can be very large, particular when we are talking about codes. LegisPro supports large documents in a number of ways. First, the architecture is designed to take advantage of the inherent scalability of modern web browsing technology. Second, we support the portion mechanism of Akoma Ntoso to allow portions of documents, at any provision level, to be edited alone. A hierarchical locking mechanism allows different portions to be edited by different people simultaneously.

Spelling Checker

Checking spelling is an important part of any document editor and we have a solution – working with a third-party service we have tightly integrated with in order to give a rich and comprehensive solution. Familiar red underline markers show potential misspellings. A context menu provides alternative spellings or you can add the word to a custom dictionary.

Tagging support

Beyond basic drafting, tagging of people, places, or things referred to in the document is something for which we have found a surprising amount of interest. Akoma Ntoso provides rich support for ontologies and we build upon this to allow numerous items to be tagged. In our FastTrack and Enterprise solutions we also offer auto-tagging technologies to go with the manual tagging capabilities of LegisPro sunrise.

Document Bar

The document bar at the top of the application provides access to a number of facilities of the editor including undo/redo, selectable breadcrumbs showing your location in the document, and various mode indicators which reflect the current editing state of the editor.

Command Ribbons and Context Menus

Command ribbons and context menus are how you access the various commands available in the editor. Some of the ribbons and menus are dynamic and change to reflect the location the cursor or selection is at in the editor. These dynamic elements show the insert lists and any editable attributes. Of course, there is also an extensive set of keyboard shortcuts for many commonly used commands. It has been our goal to ensure that the majority of the commonly used documenting tasks can be accomplished from the keyboard alone.

Sidebar

A sidebar along the left side of the application provides access to the major components which make up LegisPro Sunrise. It is here that you can switch among documents, access on-board services such as the resolver and amendment generator, outboard services such as the document repository, and where the primary settings are managed.

Side Panels

Also on the left side are additional configurable side panels which provide additional views needed for drafting. The Resources view is where you look up documents, work with the hierarchy of the document being edited, and view provisions of other documents. The Change Control view allows the change sets defined by the advanced change control capabilities (described below) to be configured. Other panels can be added as needed.

Advanced features

In addition to the rich capabilities offered for basic document editing, we provide a number of advanced features as well.

Document Management

Document management allows documents to be stored in an XML document repository. The advantage of storing documents in an XML repository rather than in a simple file share or traditional content management system is that it allows us to granularise the provisions within the documents and use them as true reference-able information – this is a key part of moving away from paper document-centric thinking to a modern digital first mindset. An import/export mechanism is provided to add external documents to the repository or get copies out. For LegisPro Sunrise we use the eXist-db XML database, but we can also provide customised implementation using other repositories.

Resolver

Our document management solution is built on the FRBR-based metadata defined by Akoma Ntoso and uses a configurable URI-based resolver technology to make human readable and permanent URIs into actual URLs pointing to locations within the XML repository or even to other data sources available on the Web.

Page & Line numbering

There are two ways to record where amendments are to be applied – either logically by identifying the provision or physically by page and line numbers. Most jurisdictions use one or the other, and sometimes even both. The tricky part has always been the page and line numbers. While modern word processors usually offer page and line numbers, they are dynamic and change as the document is edited. This makes this feature of limited use in an amending system. What is preferred is static page and line numbers that reflect the document at the last point it was published for use in a committee or chamber. We accomplish this approach using a back-annotation technology within the publishing service. LegisPro Sunrise also offers a page and line numbering feature that can be run without the publishing service. Page and line numbers can be display in the left or right margin in inline, depending on preference.

Amendment Generation

One of the real benefits of a digital first solution is the many tasks that can be automated – not by simply computerising the way things have always been done, but by rethinking the approach altogether. Amending is one such area. LegisPro Sunrise incorporates an onboard service to automatically generate amendment documents from changes recorded in the target document. Using tracked changes, the document hierarchy, and annotated page and line numbers, we are able to very precisely record proposed changes as amendments. Of course, the amendment generator works with the change sets to allow different amendment sets to be generated by specifying the named set of changes.

Plugin Support

LegisPro Sunrise is not the first incarnation of our LegisPro offering. We’ve been using the underlying technologies and precursors to those technologies for years with many different customers. One thing we have learned is that there is a vast variation in needs from one customer to another. In fact, even individual customers sometime require very different variations of the same basic system to automate different tasks within their organisation. To that end, we’ve developed a powerful plug-in approach which allows capabilities to be added as necessary without burdening the core editor with a huge range of features with limited applicability. The plugin architecture allows onboard and outboard services to be added, individual commands, menus, menu items, side panels, mode indicators, JavaScript libraries, and text string libraries to be added. In the long term, we’re planning to foster a plugin development community.

Proprietary or Open Source?

There are two questions that always come up relating to our position on standards and open source software:

Is it based on standards? Yes, absolutely – almost to a fault. We adhere to standards whenever and however we can. The model built into LegisPro Sunrise is based on the Akoma Ntoso standard that has been developed over the past few years by the OASIS LegalDocML technical committee. I have been a continual part of that effort since the very beginning. But beyond that, we always choose standards-based technologies for inclusion in our technology stack. This includes XML, XSLT, XQuery, CSS, HTML5, ECMAScript 2015, among others.
Is it open source?
- If you mean, is it free, then the answer is only yes for evaluation, educational, and non-production uses. That’s what the Sunrise edition is all about. However, we must fund the operation of our company somehow and as we don’t sell advertising or customer profiles to anyone, we do charge for production use of our software. Please contact us at info@xcential.com or visit our website at xcential.com for further information on the products and services we offer.
- If you mean, is the source code available, then the answer is also yes – but only to paying customers under a maintenance contract. We provide unfettered access to our GitHub repository to all our customers.
- Finally, if you’re asking about the software we built upon, the answer is again yes, with a few exceptions where we chose a best-of-breed commercial alternative over any open source option we had. The core LegisPro Sunrise application is entirely built upon open source technologies – it is only in external services where we sometimes rely up commercial third-party applications.

What does it cost?

As I already alluded to, we are making LegisPro Sunrise available to potential customers and partners, academic institutions, and other select individuals or organisations for free – so long as it’s not used for production use — including drafting, amending, or compiling legislation, regulations, or other forms of rule-making. If you would like a production system, either a FastTrack or Enterprise edition, please contact us at info@xcential.com.

Coming Soon

I will soon also be providing a pocket handbook on Akoma Ntoso. As a member of the OASIS LegalDocML Technical Committee (TC) that has standardised Akoma Ntoso, it has been important to get the handbook reviewed for accuracy by the other TC members. We are almost done with that process. Once the final edits are made, I will provide information on how you can obtain your own copy.

Legis Info

Applying Legislative Technologies

Category Archives: technology