AU2015203283B2 - User interface for legal case histories - Google Patents

Abstract

An exemplary legal research system provides graphical user interfaces to client access devices, with the user interfaces specifically designed to facilitate access to procedural case histories. Each interface is dynamically customized based on the procedural relationships of a plurality of legal cases to provide hyperlinks to corresponding case law documents. The hyperlinks are positioned within indicator band of the interface to indicate corresponding tiers of a court system, but also to mirror the procedural and temporal relationships of legal cases corresponding to the case law documents. Additionally, the exemplary interface includes case validity indicators to signal the precedential value or status of ) corresponding legal cases. The graphical user interface, in some embodiments, provides analogous access to statutory information.

Description

USER INTERFACE FOR LEGAL CASE HISTORIES Copyright Notice

One or more portions of this patent document contain material subject to copyright protection. The copyright owner has no objection to the facsimile reproduction by anyone of the patent document or the patent disclosure, as it appears in the Patent and Trademark Office patent files or records, but otherwise reserves all copyrights whatsoever. The following notice applies to this document: Copyright 2005, Thomson Legal and Regulatory, Inc.

Related Applications

The present application is a divisional of Australian Patent Application 2012202131 (which is a divisional of Australian Patent Application 2006268147), the entire disclosure of which is incorporated herein by reference.

Technical Field

Various embodiments of the invention concern systems, methods, and software for enabling users to interface with documents, such as judicial opinions or case documents that have complex temporal, semantic, and/or legal relationships.

Background

The American legal system, as well as some other legal systems around the world, relies heavily on written judicial opinions, the written pronouncements of judges, to articulate or interpret the laws governing resolution of disputes. Each judicial opinion is not only important to resolving a particular legal dispute, but also to resolving or avoiding similar disputes, or eases, in the future. Because of this, judges and lawyers within out the American legal system, are continually researching an ever-expanding body of past ©pinions, or case law, for the ones most relevant to resolution of new disputes.

To facilitate these searches, companies, such as Thomson Legal and Regulatory, Inc. of St, Paul, Minnesota (doing business as Thomson West), collect and publish the judicial opinions of courts across the United States in electronic form and make them available to online researchers through its Wes%w research. service. Many of these opinions are published with bibliographic cites or hyperlinks to historically related opinions, known as prior cases, from other courts that have previously ruled on all or part of the same dispute.

The cites and frygeriiuks enable researchers to readily access the related opinions electromeally within the Westlaw research system. For «ample, an opinion in a patent ease from the United States Supreme Uourt, the highest court in fee United States, would generally cite not only an opinion from the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, the next highest court for patent cases, but also an opinion of a local Federal District Court where the patent case started, thus documenting the history or progression of the ease through the U.S. federal judicial system.

The history or progression of a dispute through the court system is particularly important, because subsequent eases in a chain may overrule one or more p ortions of prior case. Thus, before relying on rulings in any given case, judges and lawyers need to understand its history. To this end, the Westlaw research system includes a KeyCite feature which, among other things, provides not only a sequential listing of cases that constitute the history of virtually any given ease, but also a short description of the relationship between the eases.

For example, the history listing haying two eases might list that one case granted a motion made in another case. The listing is a powerful tool.

However, fixe present inventors have recognized that some cages histories are quite complex and difficult to follow in a sequential list. Tins is particularly true for history listings that list a case more than once, present listings that have gaps between cases, or list multiple cases that affect a given prior case.

Accordingly, the present inventors have recognized, among other things, a need for better ways for users to interface with historically related legal cases. A reference herein to a patent document or other matter which is given as prior art is not to be taken as an admission that the document or matter was known or that the information it contains was part of the common general knowledge as at the priority date of any of the claims.

Summary of the Invention

According to a first aspect the present invention provides a computer-implemented method for indicating legal case histories, the method comprising the steps of: using a processor to identify occurrences of a piece of text having a predetermined format in a textual document; using the processor to determine a legal case history for at least one piece of formatted text in the textual document and storing the legal case history in a database; receiving a request from a client access device for the legal case history for a piece of formatted text in the textual document; using the processor to search the database based on the request and to retrieve the requested legal case history from the database; and indicating the legal case history such that an indication is provided of a parent case and of at least one related case, the parent case having a visual connection to the related case; wherein the indicating step includes displaying the legal case history on an output device in a graphical flow-chart format, and wherein the graphical flow-chart format includes a graphical representation of a parent case and a graphical representation of at least one related case, the graphical representation of the parent case being visually connected to the graphical representation of the related case by a visual indicator, the graphical representations of the parent case and at least one related case being positioned to illustrate the relationship between the cases.

According to a second aspect the present invention provides a computer system for retrieving legal case histories, the computer system comprising: a server computer having a processor and interfacing with a database; a client access device interfacing with the server computer; and an output device interfacing with server computer; wherein the processor is configured to identify occurrences of a piece of text having a predetermined format in a textual document and to determine a legal case history for at least one piece of formatted text in the textual document and storing the legal case history in the database; wherein the server computer is configured to receive a request for the legal case history from the client access device; wherein the processor is further configured to search the database based on the request and to retrieve the requested legal case history from the database; wherein the output device is configured to indicate the legal case history such that an indication is provided of a parent case and of at least one related case, the parent case having a visual connection to the related case; and wherein the output device is further configured to display the legal case history in a graphical flow-chart format, wherein the graphical flow-chart format includes a graphical representation of a parent case and a graphical representation of at least one related case, the graphical representation of the parent case being visually connected to the graphical representation of the related case by a visual indicator, the graphical representations of the parent case and at least one related case being positioned to illustrate the relationship between the cases.

According to a third aspect the present invention provides a computer program product comprising a computer useable medium having control logic stored therein for indicating legal case histories, said control logic comprising: first computer readable program code means for causing the computer to identify occurrences of a piece of text having a predetermined format in a textual document and to determine a legal case history for at least one piece of formatted text in the textual document and storing the legal case history in a database; second computer readable program code means for causing the computer to receive a request from a client access device for the legal case history for a piece of formatted text in the textual document and to search the database based on the request and to retrieve the requested legal case history from the database; and third computer readable program code means for causing the computer to indicate the legal case history such that an indication is provided of a parent case and of at least one related case, the parent case having a visual connection to the related case; wherein the third computer readable program code means is further adapted to cause the computer to display the legal case history on an output device in a graphical flow-chart format, wherein the graphical flow-chart format includes a graphical representation of a parent case and a graphical representation of at least one related case, the graphical representation of the parent case being visually connected to the graphical representation of the related case by a visual indicator, the graphical representations of the parent case and at least one related case being positioned to illustrate the relationship between the cases.

Brief Description of the Drawings

Figure 1 is a block diagram of a computer system which may be used to automatically generate case law citation data in a legal text processing system in accordance with the invention;

Figures 2 A - 2D are screen shots illustrating examples of the user interface displayed to a user of the case law citation system in accordance with the invention;

Figure 3 is a diagram illustrating the flow of data in a case law citation system in accordance with the invention;

Figure 4 is a diagram illustrating more details of the flow of data in the case law citation system of Figure 3;

Figure 5 is a diagram illustrating a system for quotation identification in accordance with the invention that may be part of the case law citation system;

Figure 6 is a flowchart illustrating a method for quotation identification and verification process in accordance with the invention;

Figure 7 is a flowchart illustrating a method for quotation verification in accordance with the invention;

Figure 8 is a diagram illustrating a negative history determining process in accordance with the invention;

Figure 9 is a flowchart illustrating a method for determining the depth of treatment of a legal case in accordance with the invention; and

Figure 10 is a diagram illustrating a method for assigning subject matter classifications in accordance with the invention.

Description of Exemplary Embodiments

This description, which references and incorporate the identified figures and incorporates the appendix and appended claims, describes and illustrates one er more exemplary embodiments of the mvention(s.) These embodiments, offered not to limit but only to exemplify and teach, are shown and described in sufficient detail to enable Grose skilled in the alt to make and use tire mvention(s). Thus, where appropriate to avoid obscuring the invention(s), the description may omit: certain informationknown to those of skill in the relevant art*

Some embodiments of the Invention areiparticularly applicable to a computer-implemented legal text processing system and method for semi-aritoxnatieaily identifying characteristics, such as citations and quotations, within a legal document and identifying relationships between Gie legal document and other legal documents stored in-the database. The legal document may be a legal ease, a statute, a law review article, an ALR article or a legal treatise, It is in the context of a legal case Gnat the exemplary embodiments are described. It will fee appreciated, however, that the system and method in accordance with the invention has greater utility and may be used for: different legal documents, such as statutes, legislative histories, and administrative proceedings, and patents. Some embodiments apply the teachings herein to non legal documents, such as scientific literature.

Before describing the preferred embodiment of the invention, a brief description of the terminology that will be used to describe the invention will be provided. Any reported decision of a legal ease ls presumed to be an authoritative statement ofthe law when it is written. Then, later events may affect the authoritativeness of this legal case’s decision. These later events may include later proceedings or written decisions during the same litigation (e.g., direct history, a decision of a later legal case from a differen t litigation which resolves the same issues in a different way or using different reasoning and overrules the earlier case, or a decision of a later legal case from a different litigation which resolves the same issue differently, but does not explicitly overrule the case, The direct history of a legal cpe may include a record o f the Connections between the legal cases that are part ofthe same litigation. The direct history may be of varying degrees of relevance and may include positi ve history fie., maintaining or supporting the authority (of the legal ease) or negative history (for example, the legal case may no longer have the authority it once had)). ITie indirect history of a case Is a record of the connections between legal ease and other legal eases which are not part of the same litigation. The indirect history of a legal case may also be positive or negative. The significance of a particular ease may oiten be indicated by the amount of discussion (he,, the amount of text) that a later case uses in discussing a decision of another legal case while following, overruling or explaining the case. This is referred to as the depth of treatment of the ease, as described below, One or more embodiments described herein may also be implemented on a system, such as that described in eo-pending U.S. patent application 10/751,269, which was filed December 30,2003 and which is incorporated herein by reference,

Figure 1 is a block diagram of a computer system 30 ffl which the invention may be embodied, The system may semi-automatieally identify characteristics, such as citations and quotations within a legal case document, and then generate information about the legal ease in the context of other legal eases. The computer system may include a computer 32, a server 34 and a plurality of client computers 36. The computer 32 may further .include a central processing unit (CPU) 38, a memory 40 and one or more processes 42, which may be software applications that are stored in the memory 40. The CPU controls the operation of the computer and executes the software applications stored in the memory. In operation, a plurality of pieces of electronic data corresponding to the text of the published decisions for the legal eases are fed into the computer and temporarily stored in the memory 40. in the following discussion, the written opinion of the legal case is referred to as the legal case. Each pieee of electronic data (i,e., each written opinion of a legal ease) maybe automatically processed by the CPU, using the processes contained in the software applications contained in the memory, to generate information about the legal ease, as described bdowt fi©*1 example, the CPU may parse the text of the legal ease to identify candidate (Lp,, unverified) citations to other legal eases > and mark these citations for later processing, may identify candidate (ie,, unverified) quotations in the text of the legal case and mark the text accordingly, may verify the source of a quotation in the text of the legal case, may determine a depth of treatment of a cited legal case (i,e„, the significance of the cited legal case based on some predetermined criteria), may determine the negative treatment of the legal case, and may assign subject matter text, such as headaches, in accordance with a predetermined classification system to citations in the legal case. Bach of these processes may be performed by a software application in the memory 40, which is executed by the CPU 38. The details of each of these processes will be described below.

Once the processing has been completed by the processes 42, the computer 32 outputs a data record 44 for the particular legal case which contains information about the history of the legal ease, informatson about the depth of treatment of citations in the legal ease, information about quotations within the legal case, and information about the subject matter text (i.e.5 headhotes) assigned to each citation in the legal case, The data record generated by the computer 32 for each legal case may be stored in a database 33 in a server 34* Then, when a user of one of the plurality of client computers 36 requests information about a legal case, the server 34 generates a user interface containing a variety information about the requested legal ease based on the data records in the database 33, and presents the user reviewing the legal ease with a variety of information about die legal case.

As example of the user interface provided to the user of each client computer is described below with reference to Figures 2A - 2D. In this manner, a user of the client computer may request data about a particular case, and the system in accordance wifti the invention provides that data to the user.

As the electronic data tor the text of each written opinion for a new legal case is received by the computer 32, the legal case is processed as described above and the results of the pmcessing is stored as a data record 44 in the ' database 33 of the in the server 34. The users of the client computers may then retrieve data about «particular legal case from the server 34. Thus, while the server 34 is providing data about a legal ease to the one or more users of the client computers, the computer 32 may be simultaneously processing additional new legal eases and adding the information for that new legal case into the database 33 in the server 34, Now, an example of a preferred user interface and information provided ίο the user of a client computer will be described in more detail,

Figures 2A ~ 2D are screen shots illustrating examples of a preferred user interface and the information provi ded to and displayed by a client computer in accordance with the invention. Figure 2A shows a computer screen 50 on a client computer displaying a legal ease being reviewed by the user of the particular client computer in which the user interface has a Windows format, a toolbar, pull down menus, etc. In this example, the display is of the text of a legal case called Pkasani v. Ceili which was decided by a California Court of Appeals. As described above, any citation for a legal case has a well-defined format which facilitate the identification of these citations within the text of the written opinion of the legal ease, in order to access more information about the displayed legal case, the user of the client computer may select the citation service, which may be referred to as KeyCite7^, from the Services mean 51 by clicking on a "KC" button 52 or click on a symbol 54. KeyCite™ is a trademark of a eftator of the assignee of the present invention. The symbol may be a colored symbol, e.g,, a flag, which gives a quick status of the legal ease, A red colored flag may warn that the legal case being reviewed may not be good law for at least some portion of the legal case, a yellow colored flag may indicate that the legal ease has some negative history, as described below, or another colored symbol, such as a blue H, may indicate that the legal case has some history' which is not negative. The invention, however is not limited to any particular types of symbols or colors. Once the user of the client computer has selected the eitator system in some manner^ the screen iriiown in Figure 2B may be displayed.

Figure 21 is a screen shot showing an example of a computer screen 50 which the invention miry employ having a control interface portion 58, and a display portion 60. The control interface purtien of the display permits the user to customize the infexmatiQn being displayed, For example, if a first radio button 62 is selected, then the full history of the legal ease, including direct history which is negative or positive, negative indirect history, and any related references may be shown. If a second radio button 64 is selected then onlv the negative direct and indirect history may be shorn. If a third radio button 66 is selected, then only the direct history of the legal ease maybe displayed so that any minor direct history (including references), remote direct history (such as appeals after remand) and mildly negative indirect history are not displayed, i The control portion 58 of the display also may indicate the number of eases which are considered to be the history of the legal case. The control portion 58 may also include a fourth radio button 68 and an indication of the number of citations to the legal case being displayed. When the fourth radio button is selected, a list of other documents is di splayed.

In the example shown in Figure 2B, the full history' of the Pleasant v.

Gelli case is indicated. As shown the various types of history, such as the direct history and the negative indirect history are displayed in the display portion 60 sad are separated from one another by headings. For each piece of history, a short description of the history or tag, such as “opinion vacated by”, “disapproved of by”, or "disagreed withfry" may indicate the relationship * between the cases listed aild the base case. In this example, an earlier decision of the same court was vacated by the Pleasant case, (Appendix shows other exemplary interfaces that may be used in conjunction with the embodiments described via Figure 2B and/or elsewhere in this description,) Mow, the citations to the legal case will be described with reference to Figure 2C.

Figure 2C is an example of a screen shot showing the computer screen 50 haying the control interface portion 58, and the display portion 60. This screen displays the legal cases which have cited the legal case currently being reviewed (i.v., Pleasant v, Gelli in the example). In this screen shot, fee fourth radio button 68 is selected, Thus, the control portion may also have a button 70 which permits the user of the system to limit the typ es of citations displayed, as described below with reference to Figure 2D. The display portion 60 may also display a quotatioii mark symbol 72 and a depth of treatment symbol 74, Which are associated with the citations for the legal case, etc. which cite to the legal ease of interest. The quotation symbol 72 indicates that the oited legal case directly quotes from the ease of interest (Le., in the example IMser v. City of Los Angeles contains a quotation from Pleasant v. Gelli), A methwt fi-w identifying quotations and verifying the source of the quotations m accordan ce with the invention will be described below. The depth of treatment symbol 74, which may be, for example» one or more stars, where the number of stars indicate the degree to which the legal ease’s written opinion is treated, e.g., the amount of text id the died case opinion which, is devoted to the case of interest The details of the depth of treatment assignment process will he described below in more detail. Now, a screen which permits a user to the limit the {Stations displayed in the display portion will be described with reference to Figure 2D.

Figure 2D is an example of a screen shot showing the computer screen 50 with the control portion 58 and the display portion ¢0. In this screen shot, it is assumed the user of die system has selected the limit citation button 70 shown in Figure 2C. As shown, the user of the systemmay strict the citations displayed based oh headnotes or topics and the system will evaluate all of the citations against the selected headnotes or topi cs so that only the legal eases containing the selected headnotes or topics are displayed in the screen shot shown in Figure 2C. A headnote may ben few sentenees/paragraph which are located at: the beginning of a legal case and indicate a summary Of the law of a particular portion of the legal ease. The user interface of the system permits a researcher to quickly and efficiently perform verification and collocation functions on a legal case, The details of the system for generating information about the legal case and providing the verification and collocation functions in accordance with the: invention will now be described.

Figure 3 is a diagram illustrating a method 100 in accordance with the invention which may be implemented on the computer system of Figure 1 -for processing a legal case to generate information about the legal case which may be used for verification and collocation functions. As an aid in understanding the processes, the movement of a single legal ease will be described. It should be understood, however, that a plurality of legal cases may be processed: at the same time since each legal case may be at a different point in the process, Ah electronic version of the text of a legal case 102 , referred to herein as "WLLOAD", is fed into a citation identification process 104 (ACITB) that identifies candidate citations to other legal cases and other legal material within the tort of the legal case, and marks dp the text, i„e.s adds a characteristic markup symbol to the text, so that the citations may be easily identified at a later time. An example of a mark up symbol may be that the symbol combination "%v" placed at the beginning and at the end of the citation. This identifies the citation for later processing.

Briefly, the citation identification process identifies candidate citations by identifying certain patterns of text in the legal document and compares these patterns to a predetermined set of reference patterns. In particular, digits may be first identified in the text Next, the text is scanned for abbrevi ations proximate to the digits which correspond to known reporter abbreviations, such as "Gal.1' or "P”. Once a piece of text haying the particular formatting and punctuation of a candidate citation is identified, a ease control database 124 is queried to determine if the identified candidate citation corresponds to a valid citation in the case control database. If the identified candidate citation matches a citation in the case control database, a second proeessingpass is performed. If no match is located, the identified candidate citation maybe flagged for later manual review. As described above, each citation has a predfocrmined format The; format may be <case name>, «volume number> «abbreviation of reporter name> «series number (if more than one)> «page number in volume>. For example, in "18 Cal. App. 4th 841", "Cal. App. 4th" refers to the "California Appellate" reporter^ 4th series; "18* refers to volume 18; and "841* refers to page 841, the page of volume 18 of Gal. App. 4tb where the case decision begins,

As example of a citation to a legal case is Pleasant v. Celli, 18 Cal.

App. 4th 841,22 Gal. Rftr 2d 663 (1993) in, which the first name portion, i.e., Pleascmfy. Celli, identifies the parties of the legal ease; foe second reporter portions, i.e., 18 Cal App. 4th 841 and 22 Cal. Rptr 2d 663, identify the reporters which themselves have a particular characteristic format as described above.

Once text corresponding to a reporter name is located, the text adjacent the reporter name is; analyzed to identify the volume, series and page number of the citation as well as the year of tire published opinion. Once this tofcmisHori ?«: found, the candidate citation is identified, and marked up, as described above, to identify it as a citation. The citation identification process may use a two pass process in which first, Ml format citations, such as Plemant v. Celii. 18 Cab App. 4th 841,22 Cal. Rptr 2d 663 (1993), are identified, matched to file ease control database, and placed within a table. In a second pass through the legal case, short form citations, such as Pleasant, may be identified based on the text of the Ml citations that are contained is the table. It should be noted that these short form citations cannot be identified automatically without first identifying each full citation, For doubtful short form citations which don t match the table, a tentative identification may he made.

The citation identification process 104 in Figure 3 outputs a file 106' containing the text of the legal ease with any citations marked up. The file 106 may then be fed into a quote identification process 108: (IQUOTE) in which the text of the legal case is parsed quotations in the text of the legal case are identified and marked up, and a possible source of the quotation is also identified. At this point, the marked up quotations have not been verified. They ate merely candidate quotations which must be further processed to he verified. The details of th© quote identification process will be described below with • reference to Figures 4-6, The quote identification process may output a file 110 that contains the test of the legal ease in which both the citations mid the quotations are marked up. At this point, the text of the legal case with foe 1 citations and quotations mark-ups may be stored in a database for later use mid may also be fed into several processes. These processes may include a quote verification process 112, a depth treatment process 114, and a negative treatment process 116. As shown, these processes may execute in parallel on the same file •since each process generates infomiation about the legal case which is separate and independent from that generated by the other processes, Each of their processes will be described in more detail below with reference to Figure 7, Figure 9, and Figure 8, respectively,

In general,: the quote verification process 1Ϊ2 verifies that foe candidate quotations identified by the quote identification process 108 are in fact from the source (i.e., the citing case) by comparing the candidate quotation in foe dt«i ease ίο the quotation in the citing case. The process then generates a data record 118 containing information about the verified quotation. The depth treatment process 114 uses information generated by the system* including the verified quotations to generate depth treatment information, such as tire number of occurrences of a citation and the characteristics of the citation based on its position (e,g„ whether it is free standing, at the head of a string or in tire interior of a string The process then generates a data record 120 containing information about the depth of treatment information that is applied to each citation in the case of interest. The negative treatment process 116 generates information about any negative treatment the case of interest has received by any of the citing cases and, in step 122, a database 124 containing information about each legal case being processed is updated manually to reflect the negative treatment. The data records 118,120 from the quotation verification and depth treatment processes, respectively*: may be combined together by a grouper process 126 along with a fceadnote assignment data record 128 (HNRESULT), as described below, to generate a single data record containing the depth treatment information, the quotation information, and the headnote assignment mfonnation, about the legal case being processed. This; single data record may: then be used to generate the information displayed on a computer screen to the User as shown in Figures 2A- 2D.

The data record 118 containing the information about the verified quotations in the legal case also maybe fed into a citation loci identification process 130 which attempts to identify the supporting text surrounding quotations and citations in the legal case to generate a citation loci data record 132. The citation loci data record may then be input into a subject matter assignment and thresholding process 134 which matches the words and phrases ih the quotations to one or more keadnotes or topics and then determines, based on a threshold value, which hsadnotes are selected, as described below with reference to Figure 10. The subject matter assignment and thresholding process 134 outputs the data record 128 (HN RESULT) containing the selected subject matter text, such as headnotes, which is fed into the grouper 126, as d escribed above. Thus, the system in accordance with the invention automW^»% generates Monnaiion about a legal case and then provides that information, «sing a graphical user interface, to a person using the system when requested.

The user may quickly and efficiently locate various information, such as Citation information, depth of treatment information, negative treatment information and subject matter text, such as a heatinote, about die legal ease from a single source. More details about the system will now'· be described with reference to Figure 4,

Figure 4 is a diagram illustrating more details of the quote identification process 108, the quote verification process 112, the depth treatment process 114, the negative treatment process 116, the eiiffion loci identification process 130 and the subject matter assignment and thresholding process 134 of Figure 3. As shown, the outputs from each of these processes are fed into a system information database 33, as described above.

The quote identification process 108 uses the file containing the text of the legal case with marked up «Stations to identity and mark-up quotations as described above, The text the legal case contains unverified quotations while the file 144 containing the verified quotations is stewed in the database 33. The output of the quote identification process is a plurality of data records in which each data record has an identified quotation and a possible source of the quotation, The output of the quote identification process may be combined with the file containing the text of the legal case and the marked up citations to produce a file with marked up citations and quotations 110 winch is used as an input to the depth of treatment process 114, the negative treatment process 116, the loci identification process 130 and the subj ect matter assignment and thresholding process 134. During the quote identification process 108, as described below' in more detail with reference to Figures 5 and 6, several processes are performed. First, candidate quotations in the text file ate identified by scanning the text to identify symbols, e.g., quotation marks. Much indicate: th e beginning: or end of a quotation. Next, the beginning and end of the identified quotations are marked up with a quote identifier symbol, such as “°/eq”. Finally, a possible: source of the quotations, such as the legal case or other legal material from which the quotations originate is tentatively identified. The source of the quotation is than verified during the quote verification process 112 as describe# below. The output of the quote identification process IQS may include a Qdata file 140 which, contains information about each quotation that is later verified against the probable sourceof the «potations and a Qixt file 142 which contains the actual test of the quotations.

The Qdata and Qixt files 140,142 are then fed into the quote verification process 112 which uses an electronic database of legal cases, already available, to find and verify the possible source of each quotation found by the quotation identification process, Bor each quotation, the possible source of the quotation is retrieved. Next, the quotation identified by the quotation identification process is matched against, the text of the possible source to locate text in file source corresponding to the quo tation. This verifies the source as the origin of the quotation. For each quotation with a verified source, a data record 144 containing the verified quotations for a legal case is stored in the database 33, Then, when a legal case containing verified quotations is displayed as a citation to a legal case, the citation will contain a quotation symbol, m described above, indicating that the legal ease has a verified quotation. The depth treatment process will now be described.

The depth treatment process 114 may receive the file 110 containing the legal case text with the marked up citations and quotations and, in step 146, the depth treatment process performs several processes in order to determine the significance of file citation based on a set of predetermined criteria that are related in some wap to significance, These criteria may be the number of times that the Citation appeared in tile legal case, the type of the citation, and the association of a verified quotation with the citation, First, the depth treatment process reads through the file 110 and identifies citations which have been marked up previously by the citation identification process. For each identified citation, the type of the cit ation is detennined to be either an ordinary citation, a middle of a string citation* or the head of a string citation. An ordinary citation is a typical citation which usually appears within a legal ease and that does not have other citations adjacent to it, A middle of a string (interior) citation is a citation that appears in the middle or at the end of a string citation in which a series of legal documents are cited together in a sentence or paraeraoh. An interior citation is usually perceived by users as contributing less to the depth with which the cited ease is discussed, The head of string citation is a citation that appears at the beginuing of a string citation and is perceived by users as contributing more to the depth since it is conventional to place the most pertinent citation at the head of a string citation. The depth of treatment process may also identify the page number of the legal case for all available pagination on which the citation appears so feat a depth record is written as many times as page breaks occur in the legal case.

The information about each citation in a legal ease, such as the total number of times that the citation appears in the legal case document the types of each of these citations, and the page number for each citation occurrence is output in a file 148 which is stored in the database 33. This information, in addition to any verified quotations associated with any of the occurrences of the citation, maybe used to generate both the “citations to the case” section ’ described abo ve and the depth of treatment symbols. The technique for generating Hie depth of treatment symbols will be described in more detail below-

The negative treatment process 116 may include an automatic processing step 150 and a manual verification step 152 which generate a list of the negati ve history' (i.e., other written opinions from other legal case which disagree with or overrule the curr ent legal case) for the legal case. During the automatic processing step 150, the file containing the legal text with the marked up citations and quotations is scanned in order to identify stems of certain words, such as ’’overrule”, “recede”, “disapprove", or "distinguish", which may indicate negative treatment* As an illustration, the process to identify the root of the word “overrule" in the teat of the legal case is described. When an instance of the root "overrule” is identified, a set of heuristic rules, as described below, are applied to make a determination about whether the sentence eontaiiiing the identified root is actually an overruling, as described below with reference to ligure 8. Then, during the manual verification process 152, a human operator of the system verifies the results of the automatic process and the actual verified overrulings are added to the case control database 124, The human operator may also identify other negative history about the legal case which cannot be easily identified automatically, as described below. Toe negative treatment process aids a human operator in. rapidly identifying overruilngs, These overrulings are negative history which affect the authority of the reasoning of the legal case.

The loci identification process 130 uses the file containing the legal case text with marked up citations and quotations and a file 144 containing the verified quotations, identifies any marked up citations, and applies a set of heuristic rules, as described below, to identify and select a portion of text from around each citation which may indicate the text supported by the citation. If a citation appears multiple times in a legal case, the surrounding text for each of the occurrences of the citation is combined. In addition, if the quote verification process, as described above, has verified any quotation associated with that citation, the text of that verified quotation is also combined with the other text surrounding the citation. All of the identified text that surrounds each citation may then be used to determine one or more headnotes or subject matter headings which may be applicable to the citation, The subject matter heading classifies the citation based on a predetermined number of subject matter areas, such as Intellectual Property or Patents, A process 154 (Headqf) reads all of tbe text identified, adjacent to a given citation and generates a riatural language search query to search an existing database for matches to the identified text, as described below, lire natural language query process is generally described in U.S, Patent Nbs. 5,265,065 and 5,·418,948, which are assigned to the same assignee as the present application and are incorporated herein by reference. The Headqf process 154 generates a file 156 containing thenatural language queries. Using the natural language queries, a subject matter assignment process step 158 runs the natural language queries against a headnotes database to identify subject matter headings, such as headnotes, which possibly match the text surrounding the citation. lor each matched subject matter heading, the query also generates a belief score value indicating how dose the subject matter heading match was to the text, A predetermined number of the most closely relevant subject matter headings and their belief scorns are provided to a thresholding process step 160.

The thresholding step uses the subject matter headings identified and performs various calculations which take into account the rank of the subject matter headings, the belief score of the subj ect matter headings and the number of citations which reference that subject matter heading. After the calculations are performed, a predetermined number of top headnote hits and a flag for each headnote indicating if the headnote passed the thresholding are stored in the database 33 with a link to the citation. These subject matter headings permit citations in the legal case to be classified by and searched for using these subject matter headings, as described above with reference to Figure 2D. Now, the quote identification process will be described in more detail.

Figures 5 and 6 are diagram illustrating more details about the quote identification process 108 in accordance with the invention. The quote identification process 108 may include a lexical scanner process 170, a paragraph buffer 172 and a main loop process 174 to receive fire text of the legal ease and automatically generate a file containing each quotation identified and a possible source for each quotation. The lexical scanner 170 splits documents into logical fragments, known as tokens, and these tokens are then used by the main loop process 174 to identify quotations. The tokens which are identified by the lexical seamier may indude capitalized words, punctuation marks that might end a sentence, white space such as one or more spaces, ope names, footnote references, star of quote makers and end of quote markers. The lexical scanner process used may be based on any of a number of commercially available software applications, such as, for example, an application known as FLEX, available from. Sun Microsystems Inc, Mountain View, CA, The lexical scanner accepts grammar specifying patterns and identifies an action When a specific pattern is located, in particular, the lexical scanner, in accordance, with the invention may divide a legal case into the certain types of paragraphs based on a predetermined set of criteria, such as a set of rifles: 1 j a paragraph which M|ht contain a quotation; 2) paragraphs which are indented block quotations; 3) paragraphs which contain important information about the document, such as the star of the document, the document's serial number or the end of the document; and 4) paragraphs which are of no interest to the quotation identification process, such as headaotes, headings and the like. A variety of different Criteria and rides may be used to identify these paragraphs.

An example of a set of rules which may be used by the invention will now be described, The set may include a role that identifies paragraphs which do not contain any quotations and stores them in the paragraph buffers where they are overwritten by the next paragraph, and a rale for paragraphs with possible quotations in which the lexical scanner returns a tag to the main loop indicating that the paragraph is either a normal text paragraph, an indented block quotation paragraph, or that the text of the quotation appears in a footnote. Once fhe type of the paragraph is determined, the lexical scannerprocesses the text within the paragraph in the same manner to identify any tokens in each paragraph,

Within each paragraph, the lexical scanner may identify' the following tokens: a capitalized word, a non-capitalized word, a numeric character string, an abbreviation, a proper name (i.e., "Mr. Smith”), a ease citation, a section reference (ie., "Section 150*), a case name (is,. Roe v, Wade), an embedded reference, any end of the sentence punctuation, any other punctuation characters, a colon, semicolon or comma followed by a space, single or multiple White space characters, a start of a quotation, an end of a quotation, the number of a footnote, open and close parentheses, open and close brackets, open and close curly braces, a mark-up for a citation, arid a mark-up for an embedded reference.

More details about the operation and modification Of fee FLEX software application is available from the Sun Microsystems Jhc. Reference Manual,

Programmers Overview Utilities and Libraries^ Chapter 9, pp, 203 » 226, which '1 is incoiporated herein by reference^

The paragraph buffers 172 are where the tokens about the paragraph most recently scanned by fee lexical scanner are stored before being processed by the main loop 174 and then possibly written out into an output file if a quotation is identified in the paragraph. The main loop 174 may decide what action to take for each token returned by the lexical scanner, manage fee paragraph buffers, and decide when to discard data for a previous paragraph from the paragraph buffer, link several physical paragraphs together into a virtual paragraph for quotations which run over several physical paragraphs, determine where die breaks between sentences occur within a paragraph, and decide when to process a virtual paragraph by a set of heuristic rules, as described below.

Figure 6 is a flowchart of the quotation identification process 108 in accordance with the invention. In step 180, the legal case text is scanned paragraph by paragraph and for each paragraph, the sentences and tokens in the paragraph are identified. In the step 182, a set of heuristic rules is applied to each token in a paragraph to determine if a quotation had been identified. One of the most important functions of the lexical scanner and the quotation identification process is to identify the beginning and end of a quotation. This is difficult since each writer may use a slightly different format for the beginning and ending of a quotation. Therefore, several rules are needed to identify the beginning and ending of a quotation. An example of a set of heuristic rules that may be applied to accomplish such identification will now be described. These rides may use the lexical scanner to identify a conventional start quotation punctuation symbol, such as “or”, to identify a conventional end of quotation delimiter, such as “or”, or to identify a stari/end of quotation symbol in a longer string of characters. For example, a rale may attempt to identify strings in which the conventional end of quotation symbol is embedded within a sentence. For each of these rales, th e characters surrounding the token may be checked to ensure that the token is In fact a star of end of the quotation.

Once the rules have hem applied to each token in a paragraph, the quotation identification process determines if another paragraph exists in step 1,84 and loop to step 180 to process anew paragraph. Once all of the paragraphs have Been analyzed, in step 186, the process output die data record containing the identified quotations and the possible source of those quotations. Now, the quotation verification process Will he described.

Figure 7 is a flowchart illustrating the method 112 for verifying a quotation in accordance with the invention. At step 200, the quote verification process reads in the text strings identified as quotations by foe quote identification process 108 and identifies separators, when present, from a predetermined set of separators in the text strings. The separators may include ellipses, bracketed expressions, and stop phrases. Tire stop phrases include a variety of legal phrases and others which do not help identify the source of a quotation, for example, “citatkm(s) omitted*', "sic", "emphasis provided'’ and the like. When present, the separators are used to parse the text string into segments in which each segment includes the works that occur between a pair of separators, in step 2Q2, the text string is parsed to determine its length since the minimum verifiable quote length may be, for example, six non-stop words, where stop words are non-content bearing words such as articles and prepositions. 'Hie text string is also parsed to collapse any words which contain apostrophes or other punctuation marks (e,g., "Tjhcn”). The parsed quotation text string falls into one of two distinct categories: (1) a text string with a single segment, or (2) a text string with multiple segments. Thus, in step 204, the system determines if the text string has a single segment. If the text string has a single segment, then in step 205, the collection normalized inverse document frequency (IDF) for each term (word) in the single segment of the text siring is determined. A document frequency value indicates the frequency of a particular term in a typical document collection, while IDF is equal to the reciprocal of document: frequency (i,&amp;, l/doc freq), of in other words, the rarity of a term in a document collection, in a preferred embodiment, the collection normalized inverse document frequency (IDF) may be calculated, if the number of occurrences of a word is greater than zero, as:

where Doe_Qccurrenees is the number of documents in which the given term is present and Colieetioo_Bocs is the total number of documents in the collection. The IDF is use<i for purposes of determining good terms for matching, since a rare word is more likely to be distinct and provide a good indication that the quotation is from the candidate source.

Once the IDF has been calculated for each term, a selected number of the terms (i.e., six) with die highest IDF values below a selected threshold may be ranked by IDF value (step 206) and placed into a "template* (i.e., storage array) (step 207) which indicates the position of each term in the text string. Any terms with an unusually high IDF value {e.g,, greater than 0.80) are not used, since such, infrequently occurring terms are often misspelled words. If there are several terms with the same IDF value, then the alphanumeric ordering of the terms may be used as a secondary key for ranking the terms for the template. Should there still exist equivalent terms (e,g,, terms with the same IDF values and alphanumeric spellings) then the position of the terms in the text string may be used as a third key for ranking the terms in the template, The template may then be compared to the quotation from the.candidate source document to determine if an exact match, based on the positions of the high IDF terms, occurs in step 208, If ah exact match occurs, then in step 210, the verified quotation is output and fed into the database as described above. In the event that an exact match does not occur in step 212, a certification match failure message is generated and the quo tation is not stored in the database.

In step 204, if the text string has multiple segments (to., it contains one or more separator terms in the text string, such as "The roof fell in... crashing down ), the process goes to step 214 in which the IDE for each term within each required segment is determine, Then, a selected number of terms (e.g., four) within each segment, with the highest IDF val ues below the threshold, are ranked by IDF (step 215) and placed into a template (step 216) in order to determine the position of the terms in the segment for matching purposes (step 208), For a text string with more than, four segments, the fftst two and last two segments may be used to match against the candidate source document (step 217-218). In this manner, the quotations identified by the automatic quote identification process are automatically verified and any verified quotations are identified by a quotation symbol, as described above. Now, thenegative treatment process in accordance with the invention will be: described,

Figure 8 is a diagram illustrating a method220 for determining the negative treatment of a legal case in accordance with the invention. The: file 110 containing the text of the legal ease with the marked up quotations and citations is input into the automatic negative treatment process 150. The automatic negative treatment process may 1) identify occurrences of the word stem '‘overrule” in the legal ease; 2J determine the proximity of the stem to a qitatlon; and 3) exclude any bad legal cases. Prior to identifying the stem “overrule”, the case control database 124 maybe checked and the automatic processing stopped if any history already exists for the legal ease, To identify the occurrences of the stem “overrule?*, the text of the legal ease is are seamed ami the verb teuse of any occurrences of the stem is determined. The verb tense of the stem indicates whether the overruling refers to the current case overruling a previous case or some other type of overruling, A set of heuristic rules may look for a particular verb tense and then take an action based on the verb tenser

An example of the set of the rules used will now be described, but the invention is not limited to any particular set of rales. For example; one rule may locate ’'overrule” or overrules" in a sentence and then semis backwards for up;:to four words. If ’hot" or never" is located, then the sentence is discarded since it does not refer to an actual ovetmling. If "we" is found, then the sentence is added to the list of possible overruling which are reviewed by a human being. If none of the phrases is located during the backwards scan, the sentence: is also added to the list.

Another rule may locate "overrule" and then scans backwards for up to . five words to attempt to locate non-case words which would indicate that something other than die legal case is being overruled so that the sentence is not added to the list. A few examples of these non-case words incl ude "request", "motion”, “objection”, "claim”, and 'Verdict". If the rule locates "point" or "points” then the sentence may be- scanned forward to the end of the sentence and if "case”, "cases" or "supra" is located, then the status of rite sentence is unknown and it is passed on to the human reviewer.

Another rule may locate "overrule" and scan backwards or forwards, and reject or accepts possible overrulings based on the other words within close proximity to the word “overrule" since these additional words will provide the context in Which the wurd “overrule" is being used. For example, once "overrule" is located, four words before the word maybe scanned and the following actions are taken when the following Words are located: 1) if "we" is located, and the word prior to "we" is "that", the "We" is ignored (discussion ! about overruling only), but if no word "that” is located, then the sentence is a possible o verruling; 2) if the verb is modified by a word that indicates uncertainty, such as "rathef5,, ‘’might", etc.,, fixe science is rejected since the court may be only indicating it might overrule the case; 3) if any word indicates a discussion of ah overruling, then the sentence is refected; 4} if a word indicates that another person did the overruling, then the sentence is rejected; and 5) if "will" or ''should" are located, the process looks back five words fori a positive word in order to accept the sentence. There may also be a similar set of rules for the verb ’’overrules”, the infinitive form of the verb and the passive voice of the verb,

Another set of rules may look for various words which indicate a discussion of whether to overrule* whether a court has die authority to overrule or a past overruling since these sentences are refected as not containing an actual overruling. Another set of rules may semenees which indicate that someone else is doing the overruling (i.e,, another court in the past). Still another rules may look for "overruling" and then determine if the sentence is rejected or accepted based on the sentences surrounding the word, as described above.

There are also other roles which look for particular features of a sentence independent of the verb "overrule". For example, if the phrase "COURT:" is located at tire beginning of a sentence, which indicates a direct quotation from the judge, thessentence may be accepted, If foe word "Congress" is located at the beginning: of a sentence, which may indicate that a Congressional statute is being overruled or that Congress itself is overrating a case, the sentence may be rejected. If the word "circulated" is found in a sentence near the word "overrule5’, the sentence may be accepted to catch unusual language, such as "because the decision overrules an opinion of this court, it was circulated to all active judges... ” which could riot be automatically identified in some other manner. Another rule may look for “overrule" within a quoted string and reject the sentence since it is usually an overruling by another court of a ease which is being quoted by the current court. in addition to the word stem "overrule! other synonyms may be searched for and identified. For example, the roles may also detect the word stem "abrogat" ibr California cases which use the term “abrogated" and foe phrase "receded from" for Florida cases since these teams are rated to indicate an overruling in each respecti ve state. These verb tense rules may be applied in any order and fee invention is not limited to any particular set of roles or any particular order of execution of foe rules.

The output of fee set of verb tense rules from foe automatic negative treatment process is a list of possible overrulihgs. Then, a proximity role is applied to each possible overruling to determine if the overruling applies to a particular legal ease. For example, foe proximity rule may eliminate a possible overruling if the sentence containing the stem does not contain a citation, if the previous or next sentence does not contain a citation dr the sentence with foe stem "overrul” does not contain a word or phrase used to refer to a ease such as "case”, "opinion”, "holding”, "precedent",: their plurals or "progeny" or "v ", “ex rel", "ex parte" or "supra”. Any sentences which contains foe stem "ovemil" and satisfies the proximity rules are added to a suggested list 222 of overruling in the legal case, T|ese suggested ovenulings aro then reviewed and cheeked during foe manual review process step 152 by a human being. The human being, during the manual review process, also determines foe ease which is overruled and that data is entered info foe case control database 124 which tracks legal cases within the legal cases database. in accordance with another aspect of this negative treatment process, the automatic process may also identify relationships other than overruled, such as "disiing" for “distinguished" or "apposite” in a legal ease, by extending the method to foe language foal characterizes those other relationships, la summary, the negative treatment process aids foe human reviewer in determining possible overruling in the legal eases by antomaticaUy detenmning possible locations of overruling so that the amount of text that 1ms to be actually reviewed by the human being is significantly reduced. Thus, foe negative treatment process increases the speed with which overruling in a legal case may be identified and added into the negativehistory of the legal ease, Now, the depth treatment process will be described in more detail.

Figure 9 is a flow chart of the dep th treatment process 114 in accordance with the invention in winch a depth treatment symbol is assigned to each citation within a legal case so that a person using the system may quickly determine the amount qf text devoted to dispssmg a particular citation. This infoHnationmay be utilized as ope indication of the relevance: of the citation since a court will devote more text and discussion to a highly relevant citation.

At step 230, flic file with the text of the legal ease and the marked up citations and quotations, as described above, is received by the depth treatment process. At step 232, the depth treatment process identifies a citation in the legal ease, and then in step 234, the type ofidtatioii is determined. Each citation in the legal case may be I) a citation at the head of a string citation; 2) a citation , without other accompanying citations; 3) a citation within, the interior of a string citation; or 4) a pro ibnna history citation (i.e., a citation that, in the context of the document, are cited solely as a ancillary historical references tor one of tire eases cited in its own right). Each Of these types of citations has a different amount of significance, For example, a lone the head of a string citation tends to be more significant than a citation in the middle of the string.

The depth treatment process next determines if there are any additional citations in the legal case in step 236 and loops back to step 232 to process the next citation, in the legal ease. Once all of the citations in the legal ease have been identified and sorted into one of the types described above, they are fed into the grouper process 126 as shown in Figure 3, After the grouper process, in step 238, the depth treatment process determines, for each different citation, the total number of each type of citation in the legal case. For example for a citation to Pleasant y. Celli, there may be a total of five cites in the legal ease of which three are at the head of a string citation and two are wifMh the interior of a string citation. This miprmation about each citation in the legal ease and any data about a verified quotation which is associated with a particular citation are used in step 240 to determine the depth symbol which will be assigned to the particular citation, Once foe depth symbols have been assigned for each citation, the depth treatment process has been completed,

One example of sjcchnique for assigning a depth synfool to a particular citation wil| now be described, but the invention is not limited to any particular technique for assigning the depth symbols. In addition, foe invention is not limited to any particular type of depth symbol In this example, a citation in the legal case with One to three occurrences of any type of citation (i.e., foe citation standing along, foe citation is the head Of the string citation or foe citation is in foe middle of a string citation) hi the legal case is assigned two stars (e.g., **), a citation in foe legal case with four to eight occurrences of any type of citation is assigned three stars (e.g., ***), and a citation with nine or more occurrences of any type of citation la assigned four stars (e.g., ****), To further refine these assignments, a citation with three occurrences of any type of citation and a verified quotation associated with the citation is assigned three stars{ e.g., **.*) while if a citation has only internal string citation types, one star is deducted from that citation, Thus, foe; depth symbol for a particular citation in foe legal case is automatically assigned by foe system in accordance with foe invention. The depth symbols help a user of the system more quickly determine which citations are probably mpre relevant, Now, foe subject matter text assignment process in accordance with the invention will be described,

Figure 10 is a flowchart illustrating a method 250 in accordance with the invention for assigning a piece of text nom foe cited ease to foe dtation in foe legal case. In the example described below, the text of a headnote in the rated case is assigned to foe citation, but foe text assignment process in accordance with the invention may be utilized with a plurality of different pieces of text in foe cited cases, in step 252, a dtation locus f.e., a region of text likely to correspond to foe text supported by the citation) for each citation is assigned according to the a set of rules which are now described.

To identify foe citation locus, several text-parsing rules may be used, some of which are stronger than others, but winch collectively would be highly likely to identify foe text. To allow for varying effectiveness of foe different foies, foe extracted text maybe dividedinto three groups, "high”, "medium" and "low”, according to the likelihood that the extracted text was part of the correct citation locus. These rules may include:

Then, in step :254, lias tons in the citation loci are weighted according to the rule:that: was used to identify them, with a high, medium or low matching corresponding to weights of 2*0, l.Qiand 0,5, respectively; Different types of documents* such as legal eases or law renew articles, may require a different set of rules to determine the weights, Onee the pieces of text have been identified and assigned a belief value, in step 256, the identified pieces of text are matched against pieces of text which may be within the cited document In one example* the pieces of text wi thin the cited document may be headnotes, but die invention is not limited to any particular type of text which the identified pieces of text are matched against. The matching may be done rising natural language query·· as described in previously referenced U.S. Patent Nos. 5,265,065 and 5,418,948 which are owned by die assignee of this application and are incorporated herein by reference. The results: of the search is a list of possible pieces of text from the cited case, such as aheadnote, which maybe assigned to the citation in the legal case and a belief score for each possible pieee of text.

Next, in step 258, the one or more pieces of text that are going to be assigned to the citation are selected though a thresholding process. The thresholding process ranks the pieces of text for each citation based on die belief score. The piece of text may be posted to the database whenever the following quantity equals of exceeds 0M

The beta values for this equation are as follows:

where the columns marked ”ALR!! contain variables for ALR articles, as described above, which have a higher belief score than the non-ALR documents. The columns labeled "non-ALR" contain variables for non-ALR documents,

In the equation, Freq is the total citation frequency for the citation pair, and lag2 ss the belief score of the second following candidate when foe candidates are sorted by belief score in d escending order (or 0,4 if there is no such candidate;). Once the thresholding has hem completed and the one or more pieces of text has been assigned to each citation in the legal case, one or more pieces of text; are stored ih the database in step 260 as described above so that it maybe retrieved for a pser when requested.

In summary, the subject matter assignment process automatically generates one or more pieces of text for a citation in the legal case based on pieces of textih the cited ease such as a head note. The process first automatically identifies supporting text in the legal ease and assigns a belief value to the supporting text, matches all of the piece of text against pieces of text ih the cited eases, and then automatically assigns a piece of text, such as a headnote, from the cited case to the particular citation. These subject matter assignments permit a citation to the legal ease to be sorted or selected by the subject matters which helps during the collocation process.

Thus, the machine implemented system in accordance with the invention automatically processes a document, such as a legal case, and generates information about foe; document which may provide foe user of foe system with useful information about the contents of the document hi a conventional system, on the other hand most of this information about the document would be generated by a human being reading foe document and making notes about foe document which is a slow, expensive, error-prone process. For a legal ease, foe system may automatically generate information about foe negative history foe legal case, about the depth treatment of a citation by foe legal case, about the quotation in the legal case which are verified as originating from a particular source, aad about on© or more headuote which are assigned to a particular citation in the legal ease. Thus, the operator of the system, may rapidly generate this information about the legal ease aad a user of the system may quiiMy locate this information since it is all readily accessible from a graphic®! user interface.

Appendix

Slide 1

Slide 2

Slide 3

Slide 4

Slide 5

Slide 6

Slide?

Slide 8

Slide 9

Slide 10

Slide 11

Slide 12

Slide 13

Slide 14

Slide 15

Slide 16

Slide 17

SMelS

Slide 20

Slide 21

Slide 22

Slide 23

Slide 24

Slide 25

Slide 26- '

Slide 27

Slide 28

Slide 29

Slide 30

SMe31

Slide 32 !

Slide 33

Slide 34

Slide 35

Slide 36

Slide 37 Slide 38

Slide 39 '

Slide 40

Slide 41

Slide 42

Slide 43 Slide 44

Slide 45 Slide 46

Slide 47 Slide 48

Slide 49 Slide 50

Slide 51 Slide 52

Slide 53 Slide 54

Slide 55 Slide 56

Slide 57

Slide 58

Slide 59 Slide 60

Slide 61 Slide 62

Slide 63

Slide 64

Slide 65 Slide 66

' Slide 67 Slide 68

Slide 69 Slide 70

Slide 71

Slide 72

Slide 73 Slide 74

Slide 75 Slide 76

Slide 77 Slide 78

Slide 79

Slide 80

Slide 81

Slide 82

Slide 83

Slide 84

Slide 85

Slide 86

Slide 87

Slide 88

Slide 89

Slide 90

Slide 91

Slide 92

Slide 93

Slide 94

Slide 95

Slide 96

Slide 97

Slide#

Slide 99

Slid© 100

Slide 101

Slide 102

Slide 103

Slide 104

GraphicalKeyCite far Cases

PiTxifiiiini’ Meikv.iΒύκijjyisif...................................-........................................................................................................- ........Hi 5>ο<:κ3Λ«!; „ ..........................................................................................................................................................................................i !2

Sw«to!y:tfS«(®:,,,....,,>,iM«,<,.......„....^.·..,,:.,',M..:y<.v,.v..v.·,,,.... ..........................................................................................................H5

Case Box Layout

Procedural Motion Box Layout

Scenarios

s

\ \ \

I

I

Summary ef Mutes * Parents are centered below their children. * Non-remand relationship arrows should enter from the bottom of the box. B When there is aT intersection between a parent and child, the bottom vertical line will be offset. 1,11 The relationship spp will occur in the court level of the parent * Cases sent down will start with a line from the right of the ease to the top of the ease sent down to. * When there is more than one case sent down from a single parent, the line from the right of die parent will continue on to accommodate the additional eases. 88 Barents that have a line commgiinto the top of the ease will have a line coming blit of the right that will then connect to it’s children. 88 Barents will be drawn to the left of a child, when they are in the same court level and there telaiionshlp is on the Lateral Litigation list B If a parent cannot he centered below a child, it will be offset below a child. 8 The width of the child will expand to the point necessary in Order for all of it’s parents relationships to be drawn. 88 When the parent would need to go around one eMld to got to another it will be offset 88 Motions for the same parent in the same Court level are stacked on top of each other. * S tacked procedural motions arc ordered with lie earliest on the bottom and the latest on the top. * When procedural motions have the same date, they are stacked in whatever order we receive them. * When ordering the children from left to right, an entire stack of procedural motions takes on the date of its earliest member. * The children will be in order with the earliest child on die left and the latest child on the right. 88 When lines need to cross their will be a bump on the horizontal line at the point where the lines cross.

If a procedural box has different history treatments to display, it shall he promoted to a substantive box. 88 A ease has remanded Child and a lateral litigation child there should have two lines coming out ofthe right of the box. 88 Only stack procedural motions that have a common single parent.

Highlights

Beyond Citation Checking? Graphical; KeyClte Paints a ..........Picture of Procedural Case History__ A picture is worth a thousand words. For legal researchers, the powerful, new Graphical KeyCits may he worth even more because it literally illustrates the procedural history of case law,

Thomson West, a business within The Thomson: Corporation (NYSE: TOO; TSX; TOC) today introduced Graphical KeyGite, the latest innovation to KeyCiie®, the service that has revolutionised citation cheeking since it was first introduced.

In that year, law librarians at the Ainerican Assoeiattoa of Law libraries applauded the intuitive KeyCite flags that instantly let legal researchers know whether a judicial opinion was still pod law, as well as the depth-of-treatoent stars and symbols that indicated how extensively the ease had been relied on in other opinions. KeyCite also was the first citation cheeking service to enable: researchers to effortlessly probe the history of a ease.

Graphical KeyCite takes these innovations to a new plateau by literally painting a picture of a case’s direct history. The feature links citations to later motions, pleadings and lower-court dedsions as the case asieads to Mghor courts. This exclusive KeyCite feature helps researtthers to instantly see how a ease moved through the court system oyer time, and to quickly understand the impact at each level. “For tile first time, the; history of the court case is illustrated, helping researchers understand the impact taster.5' said Jon Medin, director of Product Development tor KeyCite,

Medin added that KeyCite combines analysis from legal editors at Thomson West with technology to illuminate: issues such as how much the citing case discusses: the cited case, ‘The same attorney-editors who author West’s extensive collection of authoritative ease law hcadnotes also assign the KeyCite flags and symbols attorneys and the judiciary rely on to see whether citations are still good law,5' noted Medin.

Documents on Westlaw include more links: to related sources than any other legal research service. Medin noted that Graphical KeyCite leverages those links and uses proprietary technologies to illustrate the connections between court documents as they move through the judicial system,: Additionally, researchers can simply click icons to open the full-text documents on Westlaw, “in our tests, researchers using Graphical KeyCite understood the direct history of eases faster and more accurately,” said Mike Bernstein, senior director of Westlaw Marketing for Thomson West, “For anyone performing citation research, a Graphical KeyCite picture is definitely worth a thousand words.”

While the foregoing has been with .reference to a particular embodiment of the invention, it will be appreciated by those skilled in the aft that Changes in this embodiment may be made Without departing from the principles and spirit of the invention, the scope of which is defined by the appended claims.

Where the terms “comprise'5, “comprises”, “comprised^ or ^Comprising” are used in this specification (including the claims) they arc to be interpreted as specifying the presence of the stated features, integers, steps or components, but. not precluding the presence of one or more other feature, integer, step, component or group thereof

Claims (17)

1. THE CLAIMS DEFINING THE INVENTION ARE AS FOLLOWS:

   1. A computer-implemented method for indicating legal case histories, the method comprising the steps of: using a processor to identify occurrences of a piece of text having a predetermined format in a textual document; using the processor to determine a legal case history for at least one piece of formatted text in the textual document and storing the legal case history in a database; receiving a request from a client access device for the legal case history for a piece of formatted text in the textual document; using the processor to search the database based on the request and to retrieve the requested legal case history from the database; and indicating the legal case history such that an indication is provided of a parent case and of at least one related case, the parent case having a visual connection to the related case; wherein the indicating step includes displaying the legal case history on an output device in a graphical flow-chart format, and wherein the graphical flow-chart format includes a graphical representation of a parent case and a graphical representation of at least one related case, the graphical representation of the parent case being visually connected to the graphical representation of the related case by a visual indicator, the graphical representations of the parent case and at least one related case being positioned to illustrate the relationship between the cases.
2. 2. The method of claim 1, wherein the at least one related case comprises at least one of a child case and a lateral litigation case.
3. 3. The method of claim 1 or 2, wherein the visual indicator is an arrow.
4. 4. The method of any one of claims 1 to 3, further comprising positioning the graphical representations within one of a plurality of designated court-level zones, with each court-level zone representing a tier of a court system.
5. 5. The method of any one of claims 1 to 4, wherein the step of displaying the legal case history further comprises displaying a case validity indicator adjacent to each graphical representation in the graphical flow chart.
6. 6. The method of any one of claims 1 to 5, wherein the step of displaying the legal case history further comprises embedding a hyperlink within the graphical representation for each parent case and related case, wherein the embedded hyperlink is selectable to initiate retrieval of a corresponding legal case document.
7. 7. The method of any one of claims 1 to 6, wherein the step of displaying the legal case history further includes automatically positioning the graphical representation of the parent case and the graphical representations of the related cases in the graphical flow-chart format according to a set of rules.
8. 8. The method of claim 7, wherein the set of rules includes the following rule: when the parent case has one or more related cases that are children to the parent case, and where the parent and child cases were decided in different courts, the graphical representation of the parent case is positioned below the graphical representations of the child cases.
9. 9. The method of claim 7, wherein the set of rules includes the following rule: when the parent case has one or more related cases that are children to the parent case, and where the parent and child cases were decided in the same court, the graphical representation of the parent case is positioned to the left of the graphical representations of the child cases.
10. 10. The method of claim 7, wherein the set of rules includes the following rule: when the parent case has more than one child case, the graphical representations of each child case will be positioned by date of decision, with the earliest child on the left and the latest child on the right.
11. 11. A computer system for retrieving legal case histories, the computer system comprising: a server computer having a processor and interfacing with a database; a client access device interfacing with the server computer; and an output device interfacing with server computer; wherein the processor is configured to identify occurrences of a piece of text having a predetermined format in a textual document and to determine a legal case history for at least one piece of formatted text in the textual document and storing the legal case history in the database; wherein the server computer is configured to receive a request for the legal case history from the client access device; wherein the processor is further configured to search the database based on the request and to retrieve the requested legal case history from the database; wherein the output device is configured to indicate the legal case history such that an indication is provided of a parent case and of at least one related case, the parent case having a visual connection to the related case; and wherein the output device is further configured to display the legal case history in a graphical flow-chart format, wherein the graphical flow-chart format includes a graphical representation of a parent case and a graphical representation of at least one related case, the graphical representation of the parent case being visually connected to the graphical representation of the related case by a visual indicator, the graphical representations of the parent case and at least one related case being positioned to illustrate the relationship between the cases.
12. 12. The system of claim 11, wherein the at least one related case comprises at least one of a child case and a lateral litigation case.
13. 13. The system of claim 11 or 12, wherein the output device is further configured to display the graphical representations within one of a plurality of designated court-level zones, with each designated court-level zone representing a tier of a court system.
14. 14. The system of any one of claims 11 to 13, wherein the output device is configured to automatically position the graphical representation of the parent case and the graphical representation of the related cases in the graphical flow-chart format according to a set of rules.
15. 15. The system of claim 14, wherein the set of rules includes the following rule: when the parent case has one or more related cases that are children to the parent case, and where the parent and child cases were decided in different courts, the graphical representation of the parent case is positioned below the graphical representations of the child cases.
16. 16. The system of claim 14, wherein the set of rules includes the following rule: when the parent case has one or more related cases that are children to the parent case, and where the parent and child cases were decided in the same court, the graphical representation of the parent case is positioned to the left of the graphical representations of the child cases.
17. 17. A computer program product comprising a computer useable medium having control logic stored therein for indicating legal case histories, said control logic comprising: first computer readable program code means for causing the computer to identify occurrences of a piece of text having a predetermined format in a textual document and to determine a legal case history for at least one piece of formatted text in the textual document and storing the legal case history in a database; second computer readable program code means for causing the computer to receive a request from a client access device for the legal case history for a piece of formatted text in the textual document and to search the database based on the request and to retrieve the requested legal case history from the database; and third computer readable program code means for causing the computer to indicate the legal case history such that an indication is provided of a parent case and of at least one related case, the parent case having a visual connection to the related case; wherein the third computer readable program code means is further adapted to cause the computer to display the legal case history on an output device in a graphical flow-chart format, wherein the graphical flow-chart format includes a graphical representation of a parent case and a graphical representation of at least one related case, the graphical representation of the parent case being visually connected to the graphical representation of the related case by a visual indicator, the graphical representations of the parent case and at least one related case being positioned to illustrate the relationship between the cases.