We investigate the agency costs of corporate ownership structure and the role of audit committees in mitigating their effect. Using China as a laboratory, where audit committees are voluntary, we study the demand for and value relevance of audit committees conditional on the various agency costs of corporate ownership. Audit committees complement existing internal governance systems by reducing...

Though I don’t expect much sympathy, Linux does nothing for me. Sure, it offers many technical advantages, and you can’t beat the price, but it provides practically no opportunities for litigation— how can you sue others for software piracy when the software is given away in the first place? As an intellectual-property lawyer, I’d have to look for another line of work if everyone gave their pro...

introduction one of the most important factors that encourages consumers to purchase goods or use services, and make them choose one of them among various goods and services, is the design of products and services or their packaging. due to this importance, intellectual property rights protect the design of goods and services or their packaging. however, this protection is not limited to one br...

Users of commercial legal information retrieval (IR) systems often want argument retrieval (AR): retrieving not merely sentences with highlighted terms, but arguments and argument-related information. Using a corpus of argumentannotated legal cases, we conducted a baseline study of current legal IR systems in responding to standard queries. We identify ways in which they cannot meet the need fo...

In this poster I suggest that folksonomies could be fruitfully used in legal information management as a collective process of “codification” carried out by the users of legal documents available on line. In this sense, through the “lattice” topology of collective tagging systems could arise a synthesis between “openness” and “knowledge”, legal information retrieval and legal artificial reasoning.

Electronic mailing systems are the dominant communication systems in private and business matters. Public administrations deliver documents to citizens and businesses—subpoenas, legal verdicts, notifications, administrative penalties, and so forth. However, official activities are more strongly bound to legal regulations than in civil law. Delivery of crucial and personal documents raises the d...

Electronic mailing systems are the dominant communication systems in private and business matters. Public administrations deliver documents to citizens and businesses – subpoenas, legal verdicts, notifications, administrative penalties etc. However, official activities are more strongly linked to legal regulations than in civil law. Delivery of crucial and strictly personal documents raises the...

Many recent publications on legal information retrieval agree that traditional automated systems for this purpose do not satisfy the demands of lawyers. A multitude of suggestions have been made for improvement. Many of these suggestion have in common that legal information retrieval systems should be 'conceptual'. Roughly speaking this means that legal information retrieval systems should cont...

While in business and private settings the disruptive impact of ICT have already been felt, the legal sector is now also starting to face such great disruptions. Innovations have been emerging for some time, affecting the working practices of legal professionals and the functioning and legitimacy of legal systems. In this paper, we present our vision for enabling the smart government ideal for ...