Architectural Framework for Electronic Legal Solution Development.

Abstract

In the context of ever increasing numbers of legal cases and involved stakeholders in multi-party collaborations, we have discovered the appropriateness of the adaptation of more advanced information communication technology (ICT) in legal sector to address the resulting complexities and performance issues in legal service collaborations and their flow of information exchanges among different participants, which are fundamental to obtain cost effective and best professionally practiced legal services. Most of the time, systematic guidelines that could facilitate legal service solution designing and deployment, not only to identify the complex multi-party collaboration processes within and between legal organizations and legal service providers, but also to identify the nature of the information handled by the collaborative parties, is a primary requirement for clear transformation of legal service strategies into electronic systems. We have proposed a methodological framework which combines two sub-frameworks, while ensuring the alignment with Service Aware Interoperability Framework (SAIF) recommendations with the objective of understanding the legal service collaboration processes as well as of identifying the nature of the information handled by the collaborative parties, in such a way to provide a useful input for the creation of electronic legal systems. The architectural framework was developed based on Business Transaction View meta-model in UN/CEFACT’s recommendations for business collaborations. By applying the proposed framework in legal sector, it has been illustrated how the activities and information can be used in realizing services related to the domain when developing service solutions.