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Record W2286572463 · doi:10.14288/1.0099115

The records of lawyers : archival appraisal and access

2009· article· en· W2286572463 on OpenAlexaff
Michael Gourlie

Bibliographic record

VenuecIRcle (University of British Columbia) · 2009
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldSocial Sciences
TopicLegal Education and Practice Innovations
Canadian institutionsUniversity of British Columbia
Fundersnot available
KeywordsBusinessLawInternet privacyPolitical scienceComputer science

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Despite the importance of lawyers as persons within the legal system, their activities have not been well-represented in the documentary heritage of society as preserved in archives. The primary reason behind this situation is the principle of solicitor-client privilege, which traditionally protects the lawyer-client relationship from disclosure. The privilege has not only barred the archival acquisition of and access to client files for research purposes but has also apparently prevented any in depth study of the records lawyers create. This study attempts to shed light on the records created by lawyers and their possible disposition. First, the thesis uses the concepts of diplomatics and an analysis of the historical development of lawyers to categorize their work. The functions it defines include maintaining a legal practice, contributing to the profession and providing legal services to clients. The thesis then examines the central function of providing legal services by analyzing an actual lawyer’s fonds and comparing it with related records in court registries. This analysis illustrates how lawyers records fall both into functional categories and diplomatic phases. It also reveals that, contrary to certain observers, few of the documents in the lawyer’s file appear in the court registries and even fewer are preserved in archives as a result of records management decisions by the registries. These findings provide grounds to consider archival appraisal of lawyers’ records. First, it is argued that concerns about solicitor-client privilege need not inhibit preservation and access to lawyers’ records in archival institutions. With this impediment removed, archivists can proceed to acquire the fonds of lawyers on a selective basis both among and within fonds. In terms of appraisal for selection, certain records resulting from the activities within the functions of maintaining a legal practice and contributing to the profession are worthy of permanent preservation and have no access restrictions on their use. For the function of providing legal services, a statistically-valid sample of these case files should be preserved to illustrate this aspect of a lawyer’s work. However, it is vital that lawyers and archivists must work together on finding mutually acceptable policies that both respect the privacy of clients and allow access to the record of legal practice for future generations.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

How this classification was reachedexpand

Full frame machine prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.007
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.035
Version: metacan-v3-hybrid-931329e0061cValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesScholarly communication
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Qualitative · Consensus signal: Qualitative
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: Empirical
Teacher disagreement score0.992
Threshold uncertainty score0.035

Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0070.035
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0150.017
Science and technology studies0.0030.003
Scholarly communication0.0080.006
Open science0.0010.005
Research integrity0.0010.001
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0090.001

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.022
GPT teacher head0.296
Teacher spread0.274 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.

Study designQualitative
Domainnot available
GenreEmpirical

How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".

Quick stats

Citations0
Published2009
Admission routes1
Has abstractyes

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