![]() ![]() We can easily integrate with familiar and ubiquitous tools, allowing them to focus on the content and not the tool. ![]() By choosing Microsoft Office as our authoring environment, we are meeting the drafters where they are. The visual hierarchy and presentation of a legislative text can greatly aid the understanding of that text. We strongly believe in the advantages of WYSIWYG when it comes to legislative drafting. In our experience, the best type of XML schema for legislative drafters is the XML schema they cannot see. A salient trait is that it is a collaborative human process. The legislative process is often referred to as ‘the sausage machine’, alluding to a phrase attributed to Otto von Bismarck: “If you like laws and sausages, you should never watch either one being made.” It is a necessarily messy process – it has rules and no rules it is managing a more than hundred-year-old corpus in most cases it is politics it is a lot of things that are not digital. Sometimes, legislatures that adopt a custom XML editor for drafting find they need to increase their support staff numbers for the attorney drafters in order to make the solution successful. Especially if they are very comfortable with tools such as Word. While there may be some advantages in starting with a common XML schema such as Akoma Ntoso, the reality is that from day one, you are going to need to customize that schema in various ways.Īlthough a common XML schema – and the XML tools to draft within that schema – has definite utility in terms of interoperability, in practice it is very, very hard to avoid the need for customizations and it is even harder to get everyone on board to draft that way. We design solutions based on the job they need to get done and how we can draw on our knowledge pool to drive real process and business improvements.ĭesigning data models and document schemas is also an important part of our design phases. Our design methodology is based around ensuring that the as-is outputs can still be produced at all times through the various layers of automation – but we also focus on the users’ needs around ease of use. When we work with our clients, we spend time in discovery to fully understand their as-is business processes – the tools they use, their workflows and their outputs. He is keenly aware of the environment in which our tools are used. Sean has also worked on the ground with multiple legislatures and parliaments around the world, and specifically drafters, to help solve their drafting problems. Its use in the legislative domain brings advantages around automation, interoperability, managing amendments and creating rigorous audit trails. Our co-founder and CIO, Sean McGrath served on the XML Special Interest Group at the W3C which created the XML standard and has written extensively on the topic. Indeed, a good XML model does help overcome unique legislative drafting challenges but having users work within the tight rules of an XML authoring tool is a greater challenge. You might decide that drafting directly in XML is the only tenable solution. The best tool we have for modeling this complexity is the concept of a set of structured documents.įrom a technical perspective, it would be natural to conclude that these documents must be created in a strict, structured authoring tool for XML. ![]() The digital processing of law depends on its state at a given point in time, but it is a large collection of interconnected texts that influence each other in intricate ways and is in a state of constant flux. Legal and legislative data is not like financial and sales data. The challenges in this domain are intimately known to technology providers in this space. Our foundational business is developing tools for the drafting of legislation and regulations. When we decide to integrate into existing business software ecosystems, it is based on its technical practicability – but also on its business impact. We make strategic decisions that are sustainable and practical. Propylon is a technology business on a mission to create solutions that manage the complexity of legal and regulatory material and make it useful for all. And indeed, there are many alternatives – from LibreOffice, Word Perfect and Google Docs to niche editors and specialized structured authoring tools such as FrameMaker, Arbortext Epic Editor, Scrivener and Oxygen XML Editor. It has often been accused of feature-bloat, instability and un-intuitiveness. It is the go-to writing tool for everything from high school book reports to multibillion-dollar contracts, and everything in between. With over 1.3 billion devices running Windows 10 worldwide and over 60 million Office 365 commercial customers, there is no getting away from the ubiquity of Microsoft Word. ![]()
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