Abstract

With 4 billion people excluded from the Rule of Law, United-Nations Development Programs’ Commission on Legal Empowerment of the Poor established that a first strategy to foster access to justice and the rule of law would call on the greater dissemination of legal information and the creation of peer groups to provide self-help. This essay discusses how the global Legal Information Institute movement could employ collaborative technologies, also called Web 2.0, in light of the UNDP-CLEP’s vision. These non-profit organisations compile a free and open archive of primary legal materials, namely laws and court rulings, on the Internet.
Based on current examples and technological tools from the field, we establish an analytical framework called the Collaborative Document Management Framework. The CDMF is comprised of two entities, agents and documents, that interact in four relationships: links; conversations or exchanges; consumption; and writing. We then apply this framework to the specific case of legal documentation.