File picture used for representation only.
Undergraduate students at Qatar University College of Law aim to simplify law for everyone through user-friendly technologies. In November 2016, five law students founded a law technology project, called SIMPLAW, under the guidance and supervision of their professors – Dr Rafael Brown and Dr Charles Schnurman, who both teach in the Lawyering Skills Program of the College of Law.
The SIMPLAW project, which works in cooperation with the College of Law, uses an open source markup language that allows for the creation of an interactive expert system, which guides users through a set of questions and arrive at an answer. In short, the SIMPLAW project can help people make decisions.
For their first project, SIMPLAW created an expert system for the College of Law Externship program that helps students decide where they would like to do an externship. In that project, Dana Ahan and Rana Bashir worked as researchers, Aisha Al Kubaisi worked as programmer, Aljazi Almarri worked as logician and translator, and Maryam Al Otoum acted as project supervisor. While in the process of using technology to help the public make legal decisions, the students learned skills relating to leadership, management, research, problem solving, strategic, and entrepreneurship.
With new students joining, the SIMPLAW team is currently collaborating with the Law and Development Center, headed by Dr Jon Truby, to create an expert system that will help public users analyse potential violations of the law regulating air pollutants.
In order to share this project and the benefits of this new technology, the SIMPLAW team will hold a workshop on Thursday at the College of Law, in collaboration with QU’s Office of Faculty and Instructional Development program. Anyone interested in the attending the program should contact Prof Rafael Brown at [email protected].
