Publisher: Liquid Legal Institute e.V.
Authors: Kai Jacob, Dierk Schindler, Jens Wagner, Bernhard Waltl
Editing: Roger Strathausen
The legal ecosystem is undergoing an extraordinary period of change and disruption. It is being reshaped by the rapid advance in technology and the massive growth and fragmentation of the legal services market. In addition, cost pressure, regulatory overload,the challenges of scale and global reach, and changes in the work place expectation of a new generation of lawyers have been the drivers of transformation within the last decade. At the same time, entirely new expectations emerge not only regarding what the in-house legal function and their external advisors should contribute to their client’s business, but also regarding what law-makers, public administration, justice and the legal ecosystem as a whole should contribute to society.
The legal ecosystem must reinvent itself, while also reflecting the particular importance of law. Increasing digitalization and new ways of thinking offer unprecedented opportunities to meet the new and growing demands. In 2015, the idea of a Common Legal Platform (CLP) was born. It was publicly presented for the first time in K. Jacob, D. Schindler, & R. Strathausen (Eds.), Liquid Legal – Transforming Legal into a Business Savvy, Information Enabled and Performance Driven Industry. The first open discussion on the CLP was initiated at the Liquid Legal Conference in 2017. In 2018, with the formation of the Liquid Legal Institute e.V., a legal structure was set up within which all stakeholders can drive the development of the CLP.
In recent years, a number of (mostly commercial) platforms have emerged that have already incorporated certain elements of the CLP. These initiatives show that the vision of a CLP is not an utopia, but a realistic option for an efficient legal ecosystem. To ensure that the various individual contributions ultimately result in a CLP that serves the interests of all, it is important to define the essential features, structure and functionality of the CLP at an early stage. For this purpose, we have drafted the following “Principles for a Common Legal Platform”.
We would like to put these Principles up for discussion and invite all members of the Liquid Legal Institute e.V., especially the authors of the second volume of the Liquid Legal series (K. Jacob, D. Schindler, & R. Strathausen (Eds.), Liquid Legal – Towards a Common Legal Platform), but also all other interested stakeholders, to comment, supplement and elaborate on these principles. To enable a truly open collaboration towards realizing the CLP, we have made the “Principles for a Common Legal Platform” available on GitHub. You can contribute either via GitHub (Liquid-Legal-Institute/Common-Legal-Platform) or by sending us an e-mail (clp@liquid-legal-institute.org). If you are a member of the Liquid Legal Institute, you are invited to contribute also via MS Teams (Common Legal Platform/Principles).
Help us to shape and implement these principles. Let’s design the future!
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Ambition
The CLP shall be intended
- to serve as an open, neutral and interdisciplinary platform;
- to be used by individuals, corporations, legal advisors and other organizations, including law-makers, public administration and justice;
- for co-operation, interaction and exchange in the legal domain.
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Purpose
The CLP shall aim in particular at
- leveraging the standardization and simplification of legal content;
- harmonizing legal processes;
- facilitating legal transactions;
- decreasing the complexity of legal tasks; as well as
- hosting concrete data assets (e.g. commonly accepted documents and standard taxonomy), sharing knowledge and connecting people.
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Basis
The CLP shall realy on advances in
- digitalization;
- standardization;
- material law;
- methodologies;
- education.
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Objectives
The CLP shall facilitate access to
- IT systems and applications for smooth co-operation, interaction and exchange;
- legal content and other law-related resources;
- a network of lawyers and non-lawyers.
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Outline
The CLP shall be
- construed as a decentralized network;
- based on common rules and values;
- based on a governance that safeguards compliance with the principles for a CLP.
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Approach
The CLP shall be approached
- from a technologically neutral perspective (tool, system and provider agnostic);
- without regard to the particular interests of individual persons or stakeholder groups;
- taking into account the interests of the general public and the potential of the CLP to improve access to justice.
The CLP shall be intended to serve as a place for co-operation, interaction and exchange – not only between people, but also between IT systems and between people and IT systems. The prerequisites for such co-operation, interaction and exchange in a decentralized network are connecting structural elements and technical standards. Regarding the connecting structural elements and the technical standards, the following principles should apply:
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Modular structure of the CLP
The CLP shall be constructed as a stack of technologies being composed of at least
- a network layer for communication and data exchange;
- a security layer that assures secure and encrypted data exchange and storage;
- an authentication layer that assures the integrity of data and the authenticity of the participants;
- a data layer that allows the interoperability and exchange of application data between the different services and components;
- an application layer which provides services and offerings and supports modular extensions.
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Reflecting current trends and state-of-the-art in computational technologies
The structure and the technical standards of the CLP shall reflect
- the predominantly decentral creation of data;
- the shift towards on-edge computing;
- that the concept of a CLP must not be forced into the restrictive boundaries of a "data center".
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Interoperability and standardized interfaces
Services and applications offered via the CLP shall
- support authentication and data encryption;
- communicate via standardized interfaces;
- use an open and non-proprietary format to exchange data.
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Common language
The CLP shall include
- a set of common general-purpose markup languages which are used and understood within the entire network;
- a legal markup language which will facilitate the conversion of legal documents into machine-readable formats in order to enable the automated creation, fulfillment and enforcement of the legal claims contained therein.
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IT security
The CLP shall comply with internationally recognized technical security standards and the principles of
- confidentiality
- integrity;
- availability;
- authenticity;
- non-repudiation;
- accountability;
- resilience.
The nature of the CLP requires that the CLP is in the interest of all. To ensure that this is the case, a system of clear defined rules and values is required that describes right actions and is valid for all participants. The fundamental rules and values shall be as follows:
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Key values
Key values of the CLP shall be
- neutrality;
- open source;
- open standards;
- open and non-proprietary interfaces;
- identifiability of the participants.
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Ensuring neutrality
Neutrality is a crucial value of the CLP. Neutrality in this context shall mean that
- all participants can derive the same benefits from the CLP on the same terms;
- such spaces, especially in the context of virtual spaces (e.g. for contract negotiations), offer truly neutral ground, and that no party has more rights and options of access or inspection than others;
- commercial content offered on the CLP must comply with the principles for the CLP, provide the parties with neutral ground and must not prevent them from switching to other providers or other applications (no vendor lock-in).
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Ensuring sharing
The CLP does offer a protected space, but participants of the CLP shall be fundamentally prepared to
- share, within a reasonable scope, their content and services with others;
- share, within a reasonable scope, their technical knowledge;
- act, in any event, in line with the relevant competition regulations.
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Ensuring trust
All participants of the CLP shall have to ensure
- IT security;
- data protection;
- transparency;
- accessibility;
- integrity;
- avoidance of any kind of abuse.
To ensure that the CLP is in the interest of all, it also requires a governance structure that is aligned to the objective of neutrality, openness, and to form a trusted environment that supports innovations and new ideas.
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Objective of the governance structure
The governance structure must be designed to
- implement the principles for a CLP;
- establish, and monitor the compliance of, the rules and values of the CLP;
- develop and implement widely accepted legal and technical standards;
- moderate the evolution of the CLP;
- offer adequate measures to resolve conflicts and disputes.
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Basis of the governance structure
The governance shall be based on the principles of
- democracy;
- diversity;
- transparency.
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Mitigating risks
The governance structure shall be capable of preventing certain negative impacts, in particular
- abuse of the CLP by individuals, criminal organizations or authoritarian regimes;
- discrimination and exclusion;
- unfair competition.
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The Liquid Legal Institute
The Liquid Legal Institute e.V. is designed to
- serve as a platform to initiate, develop and establish the CLP;
- unite stakeholders to form a community supporting the CLP;
- setting the rules and articulating the values of the CLP.
The Liquid Legal Institute e.V. is a non-profit organization incorporated as a registered association (eingetragener Verein) under the laws of Germany. Its purpose, as defined in the articles of association, is to research and promote new ways of thinking and new technologies and other innovations in the legal ecosystem, i.e. so-called Legal Transformation. It is made up of members who belong to different stakeholder groups, including corporates, law firms, legal tech start-ups and individuals.
For more information about us and about what drives us visit www.liquid-legal-institute.org
Liquid Legal Institute e.V.
Munich (Germany)
Office address:
Almenrausch 25, 85521 Ottobrunn, Germany
E-Mail: info@liquid-legal-institute.org
Management board in the terms of § 26 BGB: Kai Jacob (Chairperson), Dierk Schindler, Bernhard Waltl
Executive director: Dierk Schindler
Register of associations: Amtsgericht München
Registration number: VR 207699