Guiding lawyers: mapping law into hypertext

摘要

This paper looks at some common structures for legal documents and describes how these structures can be mapped automatically into the Guide hyper-text system. Next it considers the types of cross references contained in a document and how they can be mapped into the links that integrate disparate independent hierarchical documents into a seamless directed graph universe of text. Next comes a discussion of how to accommodate multiple versions of a document, two-way references and footnotes. This is followed by a consideration of two access methods: cumulative index and boolean query. Finally we look at texts which help the lawyer create an original document: precedent books for drafting.