Steering Committee

The OASIS LegalXML Member Section Steering Committee coordinates the work of and manages allocated resources to Technical Committees in the Member Section. The Steering Committee is constituted by a combination of TC representatives and elected "at-large" representatives. Each TC selects its own representative to serve on the Steering Committee and the entire membership of the LegalXML Member Section elects three at-large representatives to the Steering Committee annually.

James E. Cabral Jr. is a senior manager with MTG Management Consultants, L.L.C., an independent consulting firm with 30 years of experience providing information technology planning and business management services to local, state, provincial, and federal government agencies. As a technical architect with MTG, Mr. Cabral has helped criminal justice clients in more than a dozen states to pioneer the creation and use of integrated justice information systems and has been instrumental in developing the future vision for justice IT based on open standards. In addition, he is the Chair of the OASIS LegalXML Electronic Court Filing Technical Committee and lead writer in the development and finalization of the ECF 3.0 and 4.0 specifications including GJXDM and NIEM-based schemas and web services service interaction profiles. He is also a member and former chair of the IJIS Institute Security and Privacy Committee and a member of the Global Security Working Group. Mr. Cabral holds a master of science degree in electrical engineering from the University of Washington and bachelor's degree in electrical and biomedical engineering from Vanderbilt University. He also possesses the SEARCH JIEM certification, the CCISP and CISA information security certifications.

Robert O'Brien has worked for the Courts Administration Service (formerly known as the Federal Court of Canada) since 1977, serving as court registrar at hearings, filing thousands of litigants' documents over the years and working closely with judges. Then in 1990, Robert began working with the IT staff to begin automating work processes, such as, management systems, web sites and e-filing, as the lead business analyst or user representative. Robert has been involved with the LegalXML eCourt Filings technical committee since 2001.

Robert is a representative on the Association of Canadian Court Administrators (ACCA) Technology Committee, and he is a member of the embryonic Canadian Centre for Court Technology's (CCCT) Efiling Committee.

Monica Palmirani graduated in Mathematic, Ph.D. in Legal Informatics and IT Law, and has been teaching various courses including Legal Informatics, eGovernment, Legal drafting techniques, Legal XML.

She is member of CIRSFID, one of the main centres of excellence in Italy and one of the leading centres at international level for the area of computer science and law.

She is member of Ph.D. Programme in Legal Informatics and IT Law, of the Master in the Law of the New technologies, especially for the module regarding eGovernment. She leads the LEXML.it inside of wide European network. She is a member of the scientific committee of the LEX Summer School, organised to the European University Institute in Fiesole, oriented to divulgate the usage of Legal XML in the public offices respecting and guaranteeing the legal principles embedded in the legal document form.

The principal field of research is in Legislative and Legal Informatics, in particular she is expert of XML techniques for modeling legal documents both in structure and legal knowledge aspects. She is proficient of Legal Drafting techniques supported by the ICT and she manages several projects with the Public Administration (e.g. Supreme Court of Cassation of Italy, Senate of Italy, Authority of Privacy in Italy, European Parliament, Inter-America Bank for Development, United Nations) to improve legal quality, to design legal information system, to apply the point-in-time ICT techniques. She is a member of the AKOMA NTOSO project managed by the UN/DESA and oriented to promote XML standard for e-Parliament in Africa, as well as she is a part of the technical committee of standardisation process of CEN MetaLex Workshop (European XML legal standard) and of NormeInRete the government initiative for the standardisation of legal document in Italy. She dedicated attention also to the ontological aspects contributing to the definition of same sub-schema of the LKIF (Legal Knowledge Interchange Format) and to the logic formalism of the rules represented in the norms (LKIF-rule). Recently she is joined to a working group in the RuleML standardisation process in order to open a new track dedicated to Legal RuleML. Recently she was invited to take a lecture in Stanford University, School of Law, inside of an initiative promoted by CODEX: Stanford Center for Computers and Law, part of the Stanford Programme Research in Law, Science and Technology and spent the visiting professor period in NICTA - Brisbane, Australia.

Laurel Shifrin has been working with markup technologies and information definition and delivery for over 20 years. She is the Director of Content Architecture at LexisNexis, responsible for developing a strategic content architecture framework to support the systems that enrich and deliver a wide variety of legal and business content for customers around the world. Her team has developed a library of modularized data models and vocabularies, in multiple formats, to define LexisNexis's rich collection of international content. She's been a speaker at various markup and data conferences and is a member of the LegalDocML TC.