Meta-model for Collaboration Modeling in Legal Sector

Abstract

Cost effective and best practice legal services are highly relying on the coordination of collaborative workflow activities as well as of several resources needed to perform these activities and their flow of information exchanges among many different participants. In the context of ever increasing numbers of legal cases and involved stakeholders in multi-party collaborations, we have discovered the appropriateness of the adaptation of workflow management systems in legal sector to address the resulting complexities and performance issues in legal service collaborations. In this work, a meta-model for legal service collaboration modeling which includes the main semantics of modeling elements, has been introduced as the basis for defining the choreography for sector collaboration with the objective of facilitating legal collaboration modeling in such a way as to provide a useful input for the creation of legal workflow specifications for setting up legal workflow management systems. The meta-model was developed based on Business Transaction View meta-model in UN/CEFACT’s recommendations for business collaborations. The proposed modeling framework could facilitate and guide the complex legal collaboration modeling processes with promising results in workflow coordination.