The document summarizes the work of the African Legal Information Institute (AfricanLII) in providing free access to legal information from African countries. It discusses how AfricanLII digitizes and processes legal documents, stores them using the Legal Information Institute in a Box platform, and disseminates the information through its website and mobile apps. It aims to address the lack of reliable and up-to-date access to African law by building a network of legal contributors and making over 150,000 documents openly available online to help legal research and transactions.

1. Free Access to Legal Information from
Africa
Mariya Badeva-Bright
AfricanLII Project Director
mariyab@africanlii.org

2. • No reliable, consistent and up-to-date
access to the law of African countries
Affected, among others:
• the cost of doing legal research in Africa,
including for academics and students
• the settlement of legal cases and completion
of transactions for SMEs
• investment climate for larger businesses
• regional integration
Access to African Law

3. African Legal Information
Institute

4. Successes
• Unprecedented number of African judgments
and legislation openly available via the
Internet
• Built a solid network of legal information
correspondents in Africa
• Standards adopted to ensure
comprehensiveness and completeness of
available open law
• Partnerships established between justice
sector stakeholders nationally and regionally

5. Some statistics
• Usage growth between 3% and 150% over
the past year
• Estimated over 250,000 unique visitors per
month to all African LIIs
• Over 150,000 documents available online
(started with 700)
• Visitors from South Africa and the Region,
as well as international: United States, the
Netherlands, Australia, China, Great Britain,
Germany, France, Russia, Canada, Israel,
etc.

6. Legal Informatics
Legal informatics is an area within information science.
Erdelez and O’Hare (1997) define legal informatics as follows:
The American Library Association defines informatics as “the
study of the structure and properties of information, as well as
the application of technology to the organization, storage,
retrieval, and dissemination of information.” Legal informatics
therefore, pertains to the application of informatics within the
context of the legal environment and as such involves law-
related organizations (e.g., law offices, courts, and law
schools) and users of information and information
technologies within these organizations.
(Quoted in Paliwala, History of Legal Informatics http://ejlt.org/article/view/21/38)

7. Legal Informatics @ AfricanLII
• Digitize information
• Process and store information
specialized legal information
• Disseminate information
• Search

8. Background
• Analogue medium, lack of consistent
analogue or digital archives
• Poor IT skills at content source
• Lack of strong software development and
maintenance skills in Africa
• Lack of fast and accessible links to the
Internet
• Perceived high cost of development and
maintenance
• User information retrieval literacy

9. Digitization

10. If we are lucky …
http://www.sierralii.org/files/sl/legislation/act/197
4/21/1974_21_pdf_20098.pdf
● OCR software
● Heavy on human input
● Advocacy and working with governement can
address

11. Process information
● Indigo Legislation Platform
Indigo is an open source web platform for the
consolidation and publication of legislation.
Make it easier to capture & publish well
structured legislation to facilitate free access
to law.

12. From Analogue to
AkomaNtoso XML

13. From XML to This

14. Greg Kempe Code4SA
http://www.slideshare.net/longhotsummer/the-indigo-
legislation-platform

15. Store and Disseminate
Legal Information Institute (LII) in a Box
The LII-in-a-Box provides:
1. Consumers of free legal information with a satisfactory and predictable
user experience on desktop and mobile devices, based on industry
standards for legal information publishing
2. System administrators with an easy and quick to set-up and maintain,
no-cost, Drupal distribution for legal information publishing
3. Content editors of free and open access to law websites with a
convenient editing back office interface that provides a set of custom-
developed features that enable efficient upload and management of legal
information.

16. LII-in-a-Box
Law is hierarchical and time-sensitive, so LII-in-a-Box
accounts for
• The arrangement of legal documents within national and international
hierarchies;
• The deletion, amendment and related temporal representation of legal
documents within a national hierarchy, e.g. through the availability of
current and historical versions of legislation;
• The interconnection between sources of legal norms, cases, legislation,
etc., and the practical implementation through cross-linking;
• Referring to legal information in a standard way to ensure ease of re-use
within documents of all kinds, but most importantly in other legal
documents;
• Retrieving legal information using fielded and full text searches.

17. LII-in-a-Box - System design
1. It must contain defined content types - judgment, consolidated legislation,
sessional laws, parliamentary debates, bills, government gazette, journal,
etc.- which are common across countries and legal systems, albeit subject
to localized customizations;
2. It must allow for content negotiation, i.e. to facilitate the output of legal
information in a wide range of formats;
3. The content must be captured using a metadata model, incorporating
current recognized standards, all with the aim of enabling advanced
version control and output of descriptive metadata;
4. It will employ a PRESTO architecture, which we currently strive to
implement, and which is a combined use of Permanent URIs,
Representational State Transfer (REST), and object-oriented design and
modelling
5. It is mobile-ready.

18. LII-in-a-Box: Information Retrieval
• Browsability
• Search (user-centric, but for both old-
fashioned and experienced users)
oGoogle-like
oMetadata advanced search
oTaxonomies for indexes
oMulti-site (federated?) search
• Data re-use
(Functional Spec:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1xZ71uNyBHUAD3ip5npgK6Yd5TrawVr8SpYkKoR9MYlA/
edit?usp=sharing )

19. Off-line Dissemination: Freedom
Toaster for Law

20. Off-line Dissemination: Pocket Law

21. www.africanlii.org
www.saflii.org
@AfricanLII
@SAFLII
www.facebook.com/africanlii/
you
Thank you!