The years-long effort to address the reliability of online primary legal materials at the state level finally reached the floors of statehouses across the country when bills to enact the Uniform Electronic Legal Material Act (UELMA) (pdf, 95kb) were introduced in Tennessee, Colorado, and California over a three week period from late January to mid-February.

Tennessee State Senator Brian Kelsey filed SB 2894 for introduction on January 24, and Rep. Mike Stewart followed two days later with the House version, HB 3656. Soon after, House Bill 12-1209 (pdf, 28kb) was introduced in Colorado, and SB-1075 was introduced in California, where legislators will no doubt seek the guidance of the state’s Office of Legislative Counsel, authors of a recent report (pdf, 1.5mb) which lays out some of the options for authenticating online documents and compares their relative costs.

UELMA also won the endorsement of the American Bar Association on February 6 when the ABA House of Delegates approved Resolution 102B supporting the model law. The accompanying report (.doc file) concluded that “UELMA addresses the critical need to manage electronic legal information in a manner that guarantees the trustworthiness of and continuing access to important state legal material.”

The American Association of Law Libraries (AALL) first drew attention to authentication problems at the state level in its landmark 2007 State-by-State Report on Authentication of Online Legal Resources. That survey turned up a host of troubling practices at the state level which failed to provide users of online legal materials with adequate assurance of their reliability. “It is axiomatic that persons using legal resources seek trustworthy – official and authentic – government information without reservations concerning how online versions relate to authoritative originals, transcription accuracy, completeness, and currency,” the report said (emphasis in original).

AALL is also targeting five other states – Connecticut, Louisiana, Minnesota, Nebraska, and Wisconsin – in the early months of its push to promote UELMA nationwide.