Guiding lawyers - mapping law into hypertext

This paper looks at some common structures for legal documents and describes how these structures can be mapped automatically into the Guide hypertext system. Next it considers the types of cross references contained in a document and how they can be mapped into the links that integrate disparate independent hierarchical documents into a seamless directed graph universe of text. Next comes a discussion of how to accommodate multiple versions of a document, two-way references and footnotes. This is followed by a consideration of two access methods: cumulative index and boolean query. Finally we look at texts which help the lawyer create an original document: precedent books for drafting.