Communication Mechanisms 8.1 Group Home Page 8.2 Mailing List 8.3 Teleconferences 8.4 Face to Face Meetings 9. Decision Procedure 10. Intellectual Property 1. Introduction Legal documents will soon be affected by significant changes in document management technology. XML will eliminate or at least substantially reduce the need for hard copy paper records, signed digitally.
Hard copy is extremely expensive.
It has been estimated that up to half of the cost of running a court can be attributed to the costs associated with creating, sending, storing, retrieving, using, archiving, and disposing of hard copy. Yet legal information is traditionally based in hard copy paper documents. The legal culture seems fully grounded in the concept of data and information transferred through documents from party to party or party to court or court to party. Where data needs to be extracted from documents, for example to enter in the clerk's case docket, it is found by a human clerk reading the document and re-keying the data. This takes time and invites errors.