Moreover, I got, and use, a security certificate for my email to sign and encrypt emails, and I am considering to use the Web of Trust through Thawte.

Till later,

Pavel.

The website proposes that the system uses Artificial Intelligence engine for the purpose of aiding creation of legal documents in this area. The range of documents includes Wills of varying complexity, Trusts of various types corresponging to the jurisdiction, client letters and various relevant ancillary documents.

Unfortunately, nothing like that could be found by searching Australian websites. It would be interesting to see a demonstration of such an engine and what complexity the documennts could reach; Moreover, it would be interesting to see how it responds to different needs, and if the clauses within the system could accomodate very complex problems.

Most of the areas for consumer conflicts are covered, there is a wide range of choices of legal areas which can be selectged.

The request is then forwarded to relevant practitioners in the specified geographical areas, and apparently within 3 days a client should get a response from the lawyers. This service is free for the client. For a further payment, the request can be given more urgent priority, and response can be as soon as the next day.

So far as my searches indicated, there is no equivalent service in Australia, however, the idea of such a service is excellent, yet simple. The idea of client matching is efficient in many ways, however does have some disadvantages.

Whereas one would have to usually investigate which companies specialise in which areas of law, and that may take up valuable time, without producing necessarily good results. Cleint-lawyer matching offers a system where the lawyers respond to legal problems they are prepared to take on. From the description of the problem, the lawyers have an opportunity to forsee the nature of the problem and the amount of work which could be associated with it. Whereas some large legal firms may choose to take on problems of more commercial character, some smaller law firms may choose to deal more with routine legal problems, or, for example, with legal problems involving very narrow specialisation. This system is especially good for obtaining once-only clients and new clients.

For the client, where there had been several responses to the problem, it may be possible to compare the lawyer company reputation, and to compare the legal charges. Where responses were sent by the lawyers, it also indicates that the lawyers are willing to give their time to the client’s problem probably without too much delay.

Another interested, and very important feature at that site is that after the client-lawyers was established an a legal problem was resolved, the client is required by the LegalMatch to leave a feedback about the lawyer. This allows further clients to rely on the feedback left by the previous clients to make a decision whether a lawyer may be safely relied on, and whether the lawyer achieved a satisfactory result for the client.

So far as I could see, a system like that does not exist in Australia. Maybe it could be worthwhile to set up a trial of such system to see whether it could work in Australia.

The way in which the encryption works is as follows (as may be found in the class Wiki):

This system of encrytpion may allow for all three main aims set out above (The identity, as pointed out in other discussions, might have to be verified by an independed third party, such as Verisign or Thwarte).

The principle of RSA encryption algorithm is as follows:

• Take two prime numbers, p and q. For encryption to be practically secure, these prime numbers have to be quite large.

• Multiply numbers p and q to derive a new number n, called the modulus.

• Choose a number e which conforms to 1 < e < (p-1)(q-1), and e and (p-1)(q-1) have no common prime factors between them.

• Choose a number d so that (de – 1)mod ( (p – 1)(q – 1) )=0, i.e. that (de-1) is evenly divisible by (p-1)(q-1)

When these numbers are derived, the pair (e, n) becomes the public key, and pair (d, n) becomes the private key.

The encryption then follows the following formula: Represent the message with W, and then encrypt it using K=W^e mod (n). The derived message, K, is then sent to the owner of the private key holder. The message is then decrypted using formula W=K^d mod (n).

Due to the nature of the mod function, the calculation cannot be reversed using the values in the private key, and only the public key can decrypt the message.

So far, there had not been a way to mathematically calculate the way to decrypt the message from the public key, even though it seems that no matter how large the prime numbers are taken, it should be possible to obtain a limited number of possible solutions to the problem.

One question remains in my mind: what is the length of the strings that are being encrypted? are they encrypted character by character, or is the message subdivided into strings which are then encrypted string by string, or is the whole message encrypted at once? This would require further investigation, but to me the second variant is more likely. The first one would be easily broken, and essentially be same as assigning a number to a letter (eg A=1, B=2 etc), and the latter would be computationally intensive.

eGanges system is, at present, a shell system which allows input of rules and noting their interoperation. As of itself, eGanges cannot provide legal support, and can only work as an assistance tool to legal professionals, and possibly to their clients. In such a form, a legal support system based on eGanges can only be as good as the very person inputting the rules and their interoperation in the system. Whereas eGanges is able to link several areas of law into one flowchart-like system, the initial user would have to have a knowledge of all the legal interoperations in the first place. This results in a circular argument that a legal practitioner who does not have a deep knowledge of particular areas of law is creating an eGanges based system will not be able to create a system which can be relied on fully. On the other hand, a person who is a specialist in a particular area of law, such as a barrister, will not need such a system simply because they already know all the intricacies of the interoperation of legal rules.

The only way in which such a system may present itself as a viable commercial alternative its shell was filled out with rules by a large legal research company, such as LexisNexisAU. A product based on eGanges and developed in such a way would collect sufficient amount of congregate knowledge which would enable assistance to persons of legal and non-legal background. However, such a system could get too complicated for many users as the amount of relations between different legal areas is enormous, and if a matter is of such complexity that it requires eGanges based system, it is probably just easier to refer it to a specialist.

It seems that the only way to obtain any detailed information about these programs is to accept a demonstration of the program. Of course, by such an action those companies would probably seek a prompt committal to their program which forces the law firms to just take whichever they come across first.

All of the case management systems are apparently excellent, and based upon years of experience with the legal firms. However this is hardly a determination factor.

The only real difference I could see between the case management programs from different companies is whether they operate as an independant database, or whether it is integrated through already existing programs such as Internet Explorer and Outlook (with its features such as the Planner etc.)

The only case management I have seen in place is through the use of Microsoft Access (which is sufficiently sophisticated to be programmed for case management). But the drawbacks of this program is that it is not exactly user-friendly and intuitive in its programming, and would require a sufficient amount of expense to get it running. There may be advantages in terms of finance in getting a tailor-made case management system.

So is there a way to make the process more efficient?

The main problem is that a lot of correspondence and case file only exists in paper form. Most firms do not have sufficient support staff (especially midtier and small legal firms) to handle digitisation of all the paper documents available to them. Moreover, a lot of information and file notes are hand-written, and it seems that most people in the legal firms do not have software in place to make simple filenotes which can be accessed by anyone in the firm at any time (the simplest software to implement is Access, available to most people and needing only a simple development in order for it to handle case management and file notes). While technological education of lawyers and implementation of relevant software may improve the future situation, it does not solve the present situation: what to do with the hand-written notes?

Unfortunately, the current optical character recognition (OCR) software is not yet sufficiently good to recognise hand writing, and unfortunately does not help our case. Simply scanning pages and storing them on the system will not help either, and probably will cause more difficulties, as you cannot just flip through the pages quickly.

The only way that seems half-plausible is to get a professional secretary group who could put all the handwritten notes into an electronic form. But it would involve considerable expenses. Nevertheless, if all paperwork which is not handwritten is available in electronic form, most of the information could probably be extracted from that (as all information is probably reported backwards and forwards), and the relevant hand-written paperwork could be located easier.

And while there is paperwork, I guess that the law clerks can do the work of locating it!