Fifteen years of LexUniversal – the future arrives (finally!!)
- United States
- 02/02/2016
By Jeffrey Aresty and Frank Taylor*
On September 7, 2001, after 15 months of extensive planning and organizing, LexUniversal, a virtual network of lawyers and law firms, was born in New York, USA. Ordelio Sette, one of Brazil’s leading lawyers, nurtured the idea from the beginning and has kept his vision alive for 15 years and has grown the network to over 6500 lawyers from law firms in 53 countries.
Since its inception, the world has seen the growth of e-commerce, social networks, and a rise of a global community unseen in history since the beginning of time. Lex Universal’s promise has been to develop a virtual network to unite the consumers of legal services with attorneys through technology; and now, because of the growth of the virtual marketplace and the collaboration economy, LexUniveral is poised to take the next step to make legal services available virtually across the globe. Lex Universal will continue partnering with lawyers, law firms, and many others to shape the online justice systems that will be necessary to support the virtual marketplace.
Initially, LexUniversal will engage its network of lawyers to develop the core contractual documents necessary to operate virtual businesses across cultures; it will work with groups to develop online guides for the creation of a fair trade online system for the benefit of businesses wherever they are located, and for conflict avoidance and the resolution of disputes.
As business has become increasingly globalbusinesses of all sizes are seeing networks and associations as an important way to develop their international business and to protect their assets when they operate on a multi-jurisdictional basis. By involving industry, government, universities, associations and others in the development of an online justice system, Lex Universal will lead the development of an online justice framework that will also confront cybercrime, which to date, has been the biggest risk to the growth of e-commerce.
LexUniversal stays on the cutting edge of technology and is using the energy of its network to innovate and advance.. Ever the innovator, Lex Universal is a network of lawyers who think ahead of their time.
The first confirmed use of the English noun “energy” occurred in 1599 AD with the sense “[f]orce or vigour of expression” in “speech or writing.”¹ More than 400 years later, technology offers new ways to integrate force or vigour of expression into the online content of LexUniversal and elevate the profile of the website in a global dimension of law.
Technology has been an integral component of LexUniversal since lawyers from the Global South and the Global North created the website in 2001 “to lead the legal profession to its future.”² Like the senses of “energy,” the future of the legal profession continues to evolve, and LexUniversal will continue to evolve as a platform that benefits not only its multinational corps of lawyers and law firms but also “consumers of legal information all over the world.”³
The past fourteen years have produced great innovations in the structure, accessibility, and distribution of data. LexUniversal will update the structure of the most relevant data on the website to enhance the presentation of each article and facilitate navigation among related topics. In turn, this structured data from the website will be integrated into a larger collection of data that will energize connections and collaborations around our world.
Technology makes possible the connections and collaborations that will be the future for the practice of law and access to justice. With the energy of data, LexUniversal will continue to lead the legal profession building on Ordelio’s original vision from the launch of LexUniversal, through more than fourteen years of service to the legal profession and consumers of legal information, and into a future of virtual marketplaces, a collaborative economy, fair trade, virtual currencies, online dispute resolution, linked data, an online justice system, and interdisciplinary collaboration to promote access to justice and the rule of law on a global scale.
*Jeffrey is Presidente and CEO at IBO (www.internetbar.org | www.peacetones.org | www.jeffaresty.com). Frank is Editor-in-Chief at Law Explorers Incorporated.
¹ The Compact Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), s.v. “energy.”
² Jeff Aresty, “The 7th Anniversary of LexUniversal,” LexUnversal, September 4, 2008, December 26, 2015, https://lexuniversal.com/en/news/6316. “The general meaning of power, is first recorded in English in 1665, but the sense of vigor of expression is first recorded in English in 1599, and its general application to action, speech, etc., is first recorded in 1809-10, in Coleridges’s writings. In the scientific sense of the power to do work, as in electrical energy or mechanical energy, the word is first recorded in 1807.” Robert K. Barnhart and Sol Steinmetz, eds., Chambers Dictionary of Etymology (Edinburgh: Chambers, 2008), s.v. “energy.”
³ Aresty, “The 7th Anniversary of LexUniversal,” https://lexuniversal.com/en/news/6316.
