Sean McGrath discussed Propylon, a legal and regulatory technology company that builds paperless systems for legislatures. He argued that the legal field can learn from accounting practices like using ledgers, audit trails, and point-in-time data to build more authentic, analytics-driven digital legal corpora. McGrath advocated for corpus-based rather than document-based systems that allow contemporaneous linking, provenance tracking over time, and permanent access to temporal legal data.

1. Paperless Law and Paperless Legal
Practice. Learning from the bean
counters.
#reinventlaw Silicon Valley 2013
Sean McGrath, CTO
http://www.propylon.com
@propylonsean
sean.mcgrath@propylon.com

2. Propylon Overview #1/3

Legal and Regulatory Products & Services
Company

Founded 2001. Approx 70 staff (Lawrence, KS
+ Dublin, Ireland)

LWB - end-to-end IT Systems for Legislatures
and Parliaments:
– Legislatures of Ohio, Indiana, Kansas,
North Dakota
– Parliaments of Ireland, Wales and
Northern Ireland
– +2 in 2013
2

3. Propylon Overview #2/3

TimeArc - Governance, Risk, Compliance:

Point-in-time Legal & Regulatory
solutions

Target Markets:
• Legal Research, litigation support
• Operational and strategic insight
• Auditors/Corporate Counsel

Chief Risk Officers

Governors, Legislators, Chiefs of
Staff, state/federal agency heads

4. Propylon Overview #3/3

ActiveArc: OAIS Compliant Digital Records
Management for Digital Authenticity of “born
digital” assets such as laws, regulations,
ordinances etc.

UELMA - Uniform Law Commission
Model Law

“Big Data” Analytics for policy formation
and operational efficiency

KEEP - Kansas Electronic Enterprise
Preservation

5. Sean McGrath - Background

Trinity College Computer Science, 1987

Co-founder of Propylon

25+ years of Legal and Regulatory IT
experience

Consulted for ThomsonWest, LexisNexis,
United Nations, UK Parliament, Irish
Government...

SGML maven/advocate since 1986

W3C Invited Expert to XML Working Group

3 books on markup languages for Prentice Hall
(Dr. Charles F. Goldfarb Series on Open
Information Management)

6. Common technology thread

Corpus-wide point-in-time model for digital
data

Time is key to authenticity, analytics and
paperless-ness and key to 21st Century Legal
Content Management

Some key concepts we need to adopt from the
world of accounting into the world of law

Ledgers and Audit Trail

Roll-up reporting as auto-generated
outputs

P+L is a report. What is a Statute?

7. LWB - Legislation Amendment

8. LWB Auto Generated Outputs

9. TimeArc Example

10. TimeArc

11. TimeArc

12. TimeArc
12

13. TimeArc
13

14. TimeArc

15. Ledgers - Luca Pacioli

Audit Trails

Audit Trail -> Provenance -> Authenticity

Audit Trail -> History -> Regression
Models/Prediction

Audit Trail -> Confidence -> Paperless-ness

16. Big Data -> Temporal Data

It is economically silly to throw “old” digital
stuff away - we are throwing out both the
provenance and the insight and perpetuating
paper

Relational Data Model considered bad

We need to revisit the concept of a “backup”
in the age of cloud/big data

17. 21st Century Legal Corpora

Corpus-based not document-based content
architectures

not relational

not document-by-document versioning

Contemporaneous hyper-linking/cites

Tamper evident provenance via corpus audit
trails

Truly permanent URLs

Distributed time-based corpora “nodes”

18. 21st Century Legal Corpora

Web Native

Media Neutral

Point-In-Time Access

Audit-Trail/Provenance-based

Distributed based on time-ware nodes

Truly permanent URLs

Pacioli's ledgers concept holds the key.