open-law-technology.html

---
title: Open Law Technology
layout: simple
lead: Our open law technology solutions simplify the creation, management, publication
  and distribution of legal information.
---

<div>
  <header class="py-5 bg-lawsafrica-pale-red">
    <div class="container">
      <h1 class="display-4 mb-4">Open Law Technology</h1>
      <p class="lead">
        Our open law technology solutions simplify the creation, management, publication and distribution of legal
        information. From low-level support libraries all the way up to turnkey legislation database systems, we cover
        all parts of the legal information management hierarchy.
      </p>
    </div>
  </header>

  <section class="py-5">
    <div class="container">
      {% include open_law_tech_cards.html %}
    </div>
  </section>

  <section class="py-5">
    <div class="container">
      <h2 class="mb-4">Digitise legislation</h2>
      <div class="row">
        <div class="col-2 col-sm-1">
          <img class="img-fluid" src="/img/icons/indigo.svg" alt="Indigo icon">
        </div>
        <div class="col">
          <h3 class="mb-2">Indigo Legislation Platform</h3>
          <p class="lead">
            Indigo is our flagship product for managing a legislation database. Markup, amend and publish a wide
            variety of legislative documents in Akoma Ntoso XML.
          </p>
        </div>
      </div>

      <div class="text-center">
        <img src="/img/screenshot-indigo.png" class="img-fluid my-3" alt="Indigo screenshot">
      </div>

      <h4 class="font-weight-bold">
        Designed for evolving legislation
      </h4>
      <ul>
        <li>
          Publish up-to-date leglisation in minutes.
        </li>
        <li>
          First-class support for the full legislation lifecycle: publication, commencement, amendment and repeal.
        </li>
        <li>
          Commencement tracking for entire documents, or just specific provisions.
        </li>
        <li>
          Visualise differences between different amended versions.
        </li>
      </ul>

      <h4 class="font-weight-bold">A legislation-specific editorial workflow</h4>
      <ul>
        <li>Focus on content and structure, and Indigo will take care of formatting and layout for you.</li>
        <li>Let your editorial team collaborate effectively with document annotations and a flexible task system.</li>
        <li>
          Two-step reviews to ensure accuracy and quality.
        </li>
        <li>
          Automated editorial guidance to encourage high quality document markup and help with common errors, such as
          incorrect section numbering.
        </li>
        <li>
          Integrates into Gazettes.Africa for original Gazette publication tracking and linking.
        </li>
      </ul>

      <h4 class="font-weight-bold">Integrate your content into your existing systems</h4>
      <ul>
        <li>
          Publish legislation to your website, app or partners through a flexible API that is easy for other systems to integrate with.
        </li>
        <li>
          Export legislation in a variety of formats: Akoma Ntoso XML, HTML, ePUB and high-quality, print-ready PDF.
        </li>
        <li>
          Integrations directly into our LIIWeb legal content platform.
        </li>
      </ul>

      <p><strong>Ready for Africa and the world</strong></p>
      <ul>
        <li>
          Supports the Laws.Africa <a href="https://laws.africa/publications/akn4africa-recommendation.html">Akoma Ntoso for Africa (AKN4Africa) recommendation</a>.
        </li>
        <li>
          Supports the <a href="https://unsceb.org/unsif-akn4un">Akoma Ntoso for United Nations (AKN4UN) recommendation</a>.
        </li>
        <li>
          Supports multiple languages, including English, French, Portuguese and Swahili.
        </li>
      </ul>

      <p>Use our cloud-based solution, or self-host on your hardware in your datacenters.</p>
      <p>
        We provide a full range of customisation, training and support services for management,
        editorial staff and IT administrators to help you get the most out of Indigo.
      </p>
      <div>
        <a class="btn btn-primary" href="/contact">Get in touch for a demo</a>
        <a class="btn btn-primary" href="/open-african-law">Read more about our full services</a>
      </div>
    </div>
  </section>
  <section class="py-5 bg-light">
    <div class="container">
      <h2 class="mb-4">Publish legal information</h2>

      <div class="row">
        <div class="col-2 col-sm-1">
          <img class="img-fluid" src="/img/icons/liiweb.svg" alt="LIIWeb icon">
        </div>
        <div class="col">
          <h3 class="mb-2" id="liiweb">LIIWeb</h3>
          <p class="lead">
            LIIWeb is an all-in-one legal information website built on the Django platform.
          </p>
        </div>
      </div>

      <div class="text-center">
        <img src="/img/screenshot-liiweb.png" class="img-fluid my-3" alt="LIIWeb screenshot">
      </div>

      <p>
        <strong>
          First-class support for publishing key primary legal information materials: legislation, court judgments and government gazettes.
        </strong>
      </p>
      <ul>
        <li>Add your own content types using all the power and flexibility of Drupal.</li>
        <li>Integrates with the Indigo Legislation Platform to publish Akoma Ntoso (AKN) legislation with rich, interactive reading experiences.</li>
      </ul>
      <p>
        <strong>
          Advanced search and discovery
        </strong>
      </p>
      <ul>
        <li>Faceted, full-text and boolean search</li>
        <li>Flexible content taxonomies</li>
        <li>Linking between related documents</li>
      </ul>
      <p><strong>Reach wide audience</strong></p>
      <ul>
        <li>Optimised for mobile phones so that information is accessible to anyone, anywhere.</li>
        <li>Integrates with <a href="#pocketlaw">PocketLaw</a> for a fully offline experience.</li>
      </ul>
      <div>
        <a class="btn btn-primary"
           href="https://github.com/laws-africa/peachjam"
           target="_blank"
           rel="noreferrer"
        >
          LIIWeb on Github
        </a>
      </div>

      <hr class="my-5">

      <div class="row">
        <div class="col-2 col-sm-1">
          <img class="img-fluid" src="/img/icons/pocketlaw.svg" alt="Pocket Law icon">
        </div>
        <div class="col">
          <h3 class="mb-2" id="pocketlaw">PocketLaw</h3>
          <p class="lead">
            PocketLaw is a desktop research application that provides a complete offline copy of your legal information website.
          </p>
        </div>
      </div>
      <ul>
        <li>
          Enables conducting legal research in areas with limited, restricted or expensive Internet access.
        </li>
        <li>
          Take only what you need: our Content Pack technology lets you choose what parts of your website you want to
          make available offline.
          Works on Windows, Mac OS and Ubuntu.
        </li>
        <li>
          Can be installed from a USB stick, for easy distribution to your team.
        </li>
        <li>
          Integrates into our <a href="#liiweb">LIIWeb legal information website</a> system.
        </li>
      </ul>
      <div>
        <a class="btn btn-primary" href="/contact">Get in touch</a>
      </div>
    </div>
  </section>
  <section class="py-5">
    <div class="container">
      <h2 class="mb-4">Create and work with structured legislative text</h2>

      <div class="row">
        <div class="col-2 col-sm-1">
          <img class="img-fluid" src="/img/icons/bluebell.svg" alt="Bluebell icon">
        </div>
        <div class="col">
          <h3 class="mb-2">Bluebell</h3>
          <p class="lead">
            Create rich, standards-compliant Akoma Ntoso XML documents without worrying about XML.
          </p>
        </div>
      </div>

      <div class="text-center">
        <img src="/img/screenshot-bluebell.png" class="img-fluid my-3" alt="Bluebell screenshot">
      </div>

      <p>
        Bluebell is a plain text language similar to Markdown that simplifies the authoring of <a href="http://www.akomantoso.org/">Akoma Ntoso XML</a> documents without requiring any knowledge of XML. Bluebell understands the hierarchy of Akoma Ntoso documents and structural elements, and guarantees valid and standards-compliant Akoma Ntoso 3.0 XML.
      </p>
      <p>
        No XML skills or knowledge is required. Bluebell is easy for non-technical editors to learn and use.
      </p>
      <p>
        <strong>
          Akoma Ntoso features supported:
        </strong>
      </p>
      <ul>
        <li>
          Six primary document types: Act, Bill, Debate Report, Judgment, Doc, Statement
        </li>
        <li>
          All hierarchical elements (parts, chapters, sections, paragraphs, sub-paragraphs, etc.)
        </li>
        <li>
          Tables
        </li>
        <li>Footnotes</li>
        <li>
          Quotes
        </li>
        <li>
          Editorial remarks
        </li>
        <li>
          Bulleted lists and numbered lists
        </li>
        <li>Attachments</li>
        <li>
          Images
        </li>
        <li>
          Inlines: bold, italics, underline, ref, sup, abbr, em, term, ins, del, inline,
        </li>
      </ul>
      <p>
        Rich syntax highlighting for Microsoft’s <a href="https://microsoft.github.io/monaco-editor/">Monaco editor</a> makes Bluebell easy to read and edit.
      </p>
      <div>
        <a class="btn btn-primary"
           href="https://github.com/laws-africa/bluebell"
           target="_blank"
           rel="noreferrer"
        >
          Bluebell on Github
        </a>
      </div>

      <hr class="my-5">

      <div class="row">
        <div class="col-2 col-sm-1">
          <img class="img-fluid" src="/img/icons/cobalt.svg" alt="Cobalt icon">
        </div>
        <div class="col">
          <h3 class="mb-2">Cobalt</h3>
          <p class="lead">
            Cobalt is a lightweight wrapper for working with Akoma Ntoso XML documents in Python.
          </p>
        </div>
      </div>

      <p>
        Cobalt provides a simple, object-like interface for working with the
        key details of Akoma Ntoso documents, as well as direct XML access for
        when you need to work with the XML directly.
      </p>
      <p>
        Parse and validate Akoma Ntoso documents against both a strict and a relaxed Akoma Ntoso 3.0 schema.
      </p>
      <p>
        Cobalt is used in most of our software products.
      </p>
      <div>
        <a class="btn btn-primary"
           href="https://github.com/laws-africa/cobalt"
           target="_blank"
           rel="noreferrer"
        >
          Cobalt on Github
        </a>
      </div>
    </div>
  </section>

</div>