Juris Datum

I help governments and businesses manage their legal data.

My work with legislation often involves XML, a convenient format for highly structured, natural language documents. I write parsers to construct XML from plain text, transform XML from one schema to another, and build applications for search and analysis. I work extensively with United States Legislative Markup, the Crown Legislative Markup Language, and LegalDocumentML, affectionately known as Akoma Ntoso.

Some past projects include

• building a structure-aware search application for UK legislation, described in a presentation to XML London 2016,
• writing a parser to construct XML representations of draft bills for the new legislative drafting and amending platform being built by the UK and Scottish parliaments,
• migrating the Irish Legislation Directory and the Classified List of Acts in Force in Ireland into databases, and writing a web-based editor for them,
• producing official XML versions of the Rules of the U.S. House of Representatives, and
• working with the United Nations Environment Programme to implement the recommendations of the UN HLCM’s Working Group on Document Standards.

I have also worked with businesses to produce digital information of all sorts in litigation or regulatory proceedings, including sensitive source code subject to protective orders. And I’ve prepared fact and expert witnesses to testify about software development, data management, and related topics.

I’m Jim Mangiafico, a software developer and attorney. I live and work just outside of Washington DC.

I used to practice commercial litigation at a large firm in Washington. My degree is from The University of Michigan Law School, where I was Executive Articles Editor of The Michigan Law Review.

I’ve been writing computer programs since Santa Claus brought me a TI-99/4A. In 2014 I earned first place in two Legislative Data Challenges sponsored by the Library of Congress.