FW: LexisNexis eContracts Schema Customisation

LegalXML Steering Committee,

I had a good call with John Hanratty and Hannah Clement from Lexis Nexis UK.  They have made extensions to the LegalXML eContracts schema and have mapped the schema elements to Word templates which they consider to be IP.  They’ve generated 12,000 draft contracts with these extensions.  They are requesting permission to share their templates and, if the eContracts TC was reactivated, they are interested in participating.

I suggest we:

1.
Reach out the former authors of the eContracts schema (e.g. Dr. Leff) to gauge their interest in writing an update to the spec.

2.
Reach out to the ABA to gauge their interest in participating in an reactivated eContracts TC and (if needed) adapting the extensions and templates for the US .  While there is no authority that can mandate a format for electronic contracts, guidance and endorsements from the ABA would help greatly.

Let’s discuss these steps on our Steering Committee call next week.

Jim Cabral
MTG Management Consultants, L.L.C.
www.mtgmc.com
(206) 442-5010  Phone
(502) 509-4532  Mobile

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From:
Clement, Hannah (LNG-HBE) [mailto:]
Sent:  Monday, December 05, 2011 12:22 PM
To:  James E Cabral; 'Carol Geyer'; 'Dee Schur'; Hanratty, John (LNG-HBE)

Subject:  LexisNexis eContracts Schema Customisation

Hi Jim,

I have attached our customised version of the eContracts schema.

We re-named our rnc files from ‘eContracts’ to ‘Precedents’ but they still contain the out of the box eContacts mark-up

When we make changes to the eContracts mark-up we make them to the precedent-reference.rnc file. The LexisNexis customisations in the precedent-reference.rnc overwrite what is in the out of the box eContracts rnc files.

We use trang to convert the precedent-reference.rnc file into a schema, which is what our editors use.

java -jar "C:Program Files	rang	rang.jar" -I rnc -O xsd -o any-process-contents=lax -o any-attribute-process-contents=lax -o disable-abstract-elements Precedent-Reference.rnc Precedent-Reference.xsd
Pause

I have attached our precedents user guide, Relax NG files, the Schema files (converted from the Relax NG files using Trang)

Some sample XML files and the word versions of the XML files are to follow shortly.

As we mentioned in the meeting, we are currently reviewing and standardising our precedent content, which may lead to frequent changes to our version  of the eContracts mark-up. I will keep you informed when we make changes.

Relax_NG.zip
LN_Precedents_XML_User_Guide05122011.doc
Schema.zip

Any Questions please let me know

Thanks
Hannah

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