[more] On 6/16/06, Alex Thurgood <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
In France, we appear to have a fairly large degree of latitude in pleading papers. In fact, most that I have seen from the many barristers I work with tend to be rather informal in terms of formatting, the minimum requirements appearing to be certain margin settings. There is, AFAICT, no requirement for line numbering like there is in the US. Indeed, paragraph numbering also appears to be relatively free and easy. Perhaps this is one reason why the French judiciary is in such a mess (sorry, gratuitous comments) ;-) Of course, the parties need to be identified, as does the case (when known), but these are generally common to all forms of pleading paper. My question in response to your remarks would be : why choose the US as the standard ? US based law form and procedure is far from being the most prevalent in the world despite what many Americans may like to think ;-) no trolling here, please. If the aim is to design a minimal, functional standard set for the pleading template, surely it would be better to start from the country that has the least requirements, i.e. the smallest set of features, upon which the rest could be built, extended or adapted. Let's face it, US procedural law is not known for its simplicity, by any stretch of the imagination ;-)
I have no problem with tackling the task from any angle folks can agree on, so long as we do it in a way that enables us to collaborate. E.g., if I am to help you, I need to know what your requirements are. And if you are to help me, you need to know what my requirements are. Either way, we need the end user's specification of requirements. I think we could start with a template for either the least demanding jurisdiction or the most demanding, so long as we use some scheme that lets us recycle work that has already been completed to the greatest extent feasible. Were there a single set of requirements that could serve as a foundation for all others, with the others being mere supersets of the original, that would be wonderful. But as Mikko points out, we have variability right down to the paper size, measurement unit, and character set levels. There is also the fact that those with the least demanding requirements probably don't need our assembled expertise at all. They can crank out their own templates or just treat a "pleading" as a normal default document. The relevant end users who are having trouble with OOo, as far as I have seen so far, are those who need line numbering, vertical rules, and location of firm contact information in the margins. So there is something to be said for starting with the most complex requirements set, creating a template and documentation for it, and then moving to the less complex requirement sets. But I see no huge problem with beginning from either end of that continuum -- indeed from any point along it -- so long as we develop a reference set of requirements. I agree with the opinion of U.S. procedural law that you expressed. In fact, I'd go farther and say that pleading paper requirements in the U.S. are antiquated relics of the days when U.S. legal documents were generated with a typewriter. I suspect they originated in a system that made it easier for typists to handle troublesome page break issues like the need to type footnotes at the bottom of a page, the kind of thing that is handled automagically these days by word processors. In the days when an entire page or document had to be rekeyboarded if there were a page break formatting error, line numbering on the dead-tree page made a lot of sense. There is a definite trend in U.S. courts toward doing away with such typewriter-era pleading formatting conventions, largely because they are no longer needed in the eFiling era, plus they mess with optical character recognition systems. E.g., the Oregon U.S. District Court now forbids documents with line numbering, vertical rules, and firm contact information in the margins. So from the U.S. standpoint, this project addresses an issue that will not be with us much longer. Of course, judicial systems tend to change very slowly when compared with the pace of change in the computer industry. But to cut to the chase, do you suggest a particular jurisdiction we begin with and if so, how do we determine its requirements? Best regards, Marbux
