Four new technical committees are being formed to support the standards activity of the OASIS LegalXML Member Section, complementing work currently underway in the LegalXML Electronic Court Filing TC. The LegalXML Member Section "unites legal and technical experts in a common forum to create standards for the electronic exchange of legal data." According to the new published charters for the OASIS TCs: (1) The eContracts Technical Committee will develop open XML standards for the markup of contract documents to enable the efficient creation, maintenance, management, exchange and publication of contract documents and contract terms. (2) The eNotarization TC has been chartered to develop an agreed set of technical requirements to govern self-proving electronic legal information. (3) The Integrated Justice TC plans to develop XML specifications for exchanging data among justice system branches and agencies. While its principal focus will be on data pertaining to criminal cases, its scope will include certain data exchanges in civil cases, such as civil protection order, child support enforcement and dependency and neglect cases. (4) The Transcripts TC will develop an XML compliant syntax for representing legal transcript documents either as stand-alone structured content, or as part of other legal records.

Announcements with TC proposals and charters:

• eContracts Technical Committee
• eNotarization Technical Committee
• Integrated Justice Technical Committee
• Legal Transcripts Technical Committee

LegalXML eContracts Technical Committee. The core scope of this TC's activity will be the creation of DTD(s) and schemas that can be used by parties: (1) Negotiating and finalizing contracts in an application neutral format; (2) Exchanging contract contents as valid XML; (3) Automating processing of contract content, for example for use in contract management applications; (4) To support the production of human readable output documents; and (5) To facilitate the use of reusable or boilerplate information within a contract. The TC will also define a data model or models that describe documents forming legal contracts. To support this scope, the TC shall seek to capture the business requirements of end users of the proposed standards..."

LegalXML eNotarization Technical Committee. The specific purposes of this committee is to: "(1) develop an agreed set of technical requirements to govern self-proving electronic legal information; (2) determine the suitability of such existing or emerging standards as the W3C/IETF DSIG and other technologies to the requirements identified by the committee; (3) abstract the common needs for self-proving electronic legal information, with particular emphasis on e-commerce and e-government over the Internet, from both Anglo-American and civil law jurisprudence; (4) put into context the historic requirement of signature affixation in the physical presence of the notary traditional in the paper world; and (5) produce a technical specification tailored to legal requirements which works in conjunction with other existing and emerging technical standards, particularly those being developed within the LegalXML initiative and the related work of other legal and administrative standards that have dependencies upon the legal enforceability of electronic documents and signatures."

LegalXML Integrated Justice Technical Committee. "The Integrated Justice Technical Committee plans to constitute the following subcommittees, and such additional subcommittees as shall appear necessary and appropriate to carrying out the Technical Committee's purpose: (1) Arrest/Incident Report Subcommittee; (2) Arrest Warrant Subcommittee; (3) Charging Document Policy Subcommittee; (4) Sentencing Order/Disposition Subcommittee; (5) Protection Order Registry Subcommittee. The purpose of the Integrated Justice Technical Committee is to develop XML specifications for exchanging data among justice system branches and agencies. While its principal focus will be on data pertaining to criminal cases, its scope will include certain data exchanges in civil cases, such as civil protection order, child support enforcement and dependency and neglect cases. The Committee will also serve as a vehicle for vetting the universal Justice XML Data Dictionary being developed under the auspices of the Infrastructure/Standards Working Group of the Global Justice Information Network Advisory Committee, US Department of Justice. In addition to the OASIS approval process, the Integrated Justice Technical Committee will provide its proposed and recommended specifications for registration by the Global Justice Information Network Advisory Committee..."

LegalXML Legal Transcripts Technical Committee. "Legal transcripts are documents that are created in courthouses, hearing rooms and private depositions. Their primary purpose is to be a verbatim record of the dialogue that took place. They are used to review testimony and decisions, and as an historical archive of the events that occurred. A transcript is usually recorded by a single reporter, but may be also be the work of two or more reporters. The purpose of the TC is to develop [1] an XML compliant syntax for representing legal transcript documents either as stand-alone structured content, or as part of other legal records and [2] an XML compliant syntax for representing realtime streamed legal transcript. Such transcripts will be able to provide access to the verbatim record, and any meta-information that is important within the context of that transcript. The core scope of this activity will be in specifying the necessary data model of legal transcripts and realtime streamed transcripts and the syntax of their representation in XML. The core activities are: (1) Defining a data model that describes current transcript formats for both static and realtime; (2) Using the transcript data model to design the Proposed Recommendation of the LegalXML-Transcript standard; (3) Documenting the working group's position on citation to transcripts with a LegalXML note..."

Previously organized: The Electronic Court Filing Technical Committee was chartered to "develop specifications for the use of XML to create legal documents and to transmit legal documents from an attorney, party or self-represented litigant to a court, from a court to an attorney, party or self-represented litigant or to another court, and from an attorney or other user to another attorney or other user of legal documents." There are five subcommittees as of 2002-07-30: (1) Case Management System Application Program Interface (CMS/API) Subcommittee -- including Query & Response (Q&R) and Court Data Configuration (CDC); (2) Court Document Subcommittee; (3) Court Filing Policy Subcommittee; (4) Certification Subcommittee; (5) Trusted Specification Repository Subcommittee.

Provisional TC for Online Dispute Resolution. An OASIS discussion list has been extablished for to "explore the formation of an Online Dispute Resolution Technical Committee under the LegalXML Member Section of OASIS, which would develop standard syntax for an XML language for Online Dispute Resolution - odrXML. It is envisioned that the standard would include a XSD used to validate the syntax of XML documents used for transmission and that the standard would enable information interchange between different ODR systems supporting a core data model intended to provide a basic yet complete description of a single case. The standard would provide for the markup of final decisions, settlements or other final agreements as well. This TC would build from relevant work done previously by the Joint Research Centre Online Dispute Resolution Workgroup in association with the European Commission..."