Technology

alt.legal: One Teen’s Quest To Take Jordan’s Law Digital

This 10th grader is creating the proto-Westlaw of Jordan.

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In the world of legal technology, we often get caught up in a race to new features or use cases. Innovation pushes faster and further, and the industry has so many voices that it becomes difficult to stand out. What kind of machine learning are you using? How much of the cloud’s capabilities are you harnessing? Does your product have the features of the incumbent product, and what are the differentiators? What’s your managed service footprint? Over and over, until we’re left with legal tech fatigue.

There is a remedy for this: reviewing lessons from history. Think about the first time legal research databases were made searchable, or the first time video evidence was introduced in court. Can you believe we’re only 30-40 years removed from a time when people could not Ctrl-F their way through a contract? It is refreshing and important to remember where we came from.

And remember that where we came from is still where certain parts of the world have not yet gone.

Enter my conversation with Naji Awad. Naji lives in Amman, Jordan, and he aspires to be a lawyer one day. He’s intrigued by how much information exists online with respect to U.S. law, and he has started a website (www.onlawd.com) to help his community learn more about Jordan’s law. There’s no fancy database or algorithm — it’s just a handful of cases with some summaries. But he believes it’s transformational, and he may be right.

Worth noting: Naji’s in tenth grade. Fascinating guy.

Ed Sohn: Tell me a little about yourself.

Naji Awad: Sure. My name is Naji Awad and I live in Jordan. I am in the tenth grade at an IB school, and I was required to go through a project that I am passionate about. And so, I really want to become a lawyer when I grow up, and I really, really want to study law.

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You know, it’s becoming a trend in Jordan, where other kids my age really want to become lawyers.  They are watching shows like Suits and How To Get Away With Murder, and in these TV shows, you see a guy typing into a database, and some of the precedents coming up in that database. I was thinking, how can I do this same thing, but in Jordan? My sister studies law at Queen’s College in London, and I see her study for her final exam, and I see that it’s easy for them to get the law, and really hard for us in Jordan.

My cousin studies law at the University of Jordan, and he was saying that it would be a really cool project in Jordan and help our professors give us precedents and examples in real-life. So I went around law firms in Jordan, and I asked them if they could lend me a couple of legal case files. I scanned them on my computer, and because I am under an NDA, I covered the names in black so that no one could see them. But I still allowed my community to sort of study the legal case file, without breaching the NDA. This is basically my project.

ES: So you were reading the case file from the firm… every document in the file? Or just the opinion?

NA: I was reading every single document that had to do with the case! Pieces of evidence, bank statement, the court’s process in which they decide. The Jordanian jurisdiction is different from the American legal system. I have the Amman Court of Appeal’s file as well and I have read through those.

ES: And covering the names in black, is that okay? There’s quite a lot of confidential information.

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NA: I worked with a lawyer to ensure I was in total compliance with the NDA, so with his help we treated all the confidential information. But I still have to let my community connect with the legal system.

ES: So what do you do with these cases? How do you present them? What do you plan to do with it?

NA: Actually, the first six cases are already online. Through March of 2018, I should have about 100 cases online. I’m working with the University of Jordan and every major university that teaches law in Jordan. I hope to work with all of them and help all the professors teaching law.

ES: Is it right to say that professors don’t have access to the law?

NA: They have access, but it’s really hard to access them. They have to go to the library. In America, you used to go to the library, what, in the 80s? 90s? In my country, we still have to go to the library. We still don’t have an online legal database.

ES: What about statutes? Is anything online, or is everything in paper?

NA: Everything is in paper, nothing is digital!

ES: So all of this information sits in libraries right now, in Jordan, and you’re trying to make some of it available on line?

NA: Yes, that’s right.

ES: Jordan’s government, the judicial branch, is there any precedential value for previous cases? Jordan is under a civil law system, which, I think, means that cases don’t have any binding effect.

NA: Actually, Jordan doesn’t just follow the civil code but several other systems.

ES: You mean shari’a law?

NA: Yes, that’s one of the three. You have civil law, constitional law and shari’a law. In the shari’a cases, past cases can be used as precedent.

ES: How do you choose which cases, out of thousands out there, go onto the website?

NA: I am trying to get special cases that people will want to refer to. In the U.S., you can refer to a precedent in your case, to widen your legal argument. In Jordan, there’s still no online database, so I am trying to find cases in certain categories. I am looking at financial crime and social cases, as well as many different categories that people find interesting.

ES: I see that there are some summaries of the cases. Who is writing these?

NA: I am writing them all. My supervisor on this project told me that this would be too challenging, but I feel like it would be cool if someone in the tenth grade could make something that professors could use. I wake up at 6:30 every day and work on this for just 45 minutes a day, and the project has been successful. I’ve gone through around 400 pages so far.

ES: Do you think there’s a way for these cases to be searchable? I’m not familiar with Arabic, and almost all your cases are in Arabic, but it would be interesting to type a keyword and see which cases are there.

NA: Yes, I am working with a search engine that wants to implement some searching.

ES: So I’m reading these cases — are you scanning them all in using a scanner? Are they in electronic form anywhere?

NA: No, no. I have to go to the law firm, get them scanned, put them on a flash drive, bring them home and read every one of them. The 350-400 pages have all been scanned by me. Another way of getting these case files is through collaboration with the University of Jordan.

ES: So, what are your plans for the future? You said you want to go to law school?

NA: Yes. Although I don’t know about the U.S. — actually, I read about this. You have to get your bachelor’s first, take the LSAT, then go to law school. In the U.K., you just go through University for three years, then you apply for the English boards. My hope is to get into the London School of Economics and study law there, it seems like a really cool university.

ES: You don’t want to study at the University of Jordan?

NA: The job opportunities are slim in Jordan. You might see a graduate of law that works at University of Jordan, he might get a salary of something like $560 a month. At a law firm, I saw a graduate of U.K. with large clients, and she makes far more.

ES: How different would your community be, how different would Jordan be, if everyone had access to all the statues and laws and these key cases?

NA: It would be much different. Socially, economically, politically, it would be much different. If everyone had access to all the documents, and somehow interact with the legal system, I think the crime rate would be down. People would understand everything.

ES: Naji, thank you so much. This has been a pleasure.

Ed Sohn is VP, Product Management and Partnerships, for Thomson Reuters Legal Managed Services. After more than five years as a Biglaw litigation associate, Ed spent two years in New Delhi, India, overseeing and innovating legal process outsourcing services in litigation. Ed now focuses on delivering new e-discovery solutions with technology managed services. You can contact Ed about ediscovery, legal managed services, expat living in India, theology, chess, ST:TNG, or the Chicago Bulls at edward.sohn@thomsonreuters.com or via Twitter (@edsohn80). (The views expressed in his columns are his own and do not reflect those of his employer, Thomson Reuters.)

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