Under the eLEGAL project, a consortium of European companies have joined forces to develop the different tools and templates that are required to support forming and closing electronic contracts over the Internet without any media breaks.

To explore practical business needs, a scenario is taken from the construction industry: Several construction companies and subcontractors enter a joint-venture to accomplish a construction project. Although their operational business would require several bilateral agreements on data exchange relationships, data formats, or rules for information access and acceptance these requirements are not addressed in practise. The main reason is usually a too long "time-to-contract" — and therefore too high overhead for the contracting process itself.

The eLEGAL project has tackled this shortcoming by the following developments:

1. Contracts are represented by using a domain-specific XML vocabulary. For different applications, dedicated XML Schemata have been developed (framework agreements for XML-based data exchange, ASP contracts, engineering service contracts etc.)

2. The semantics of legal clauses can be expressed by using clause types and structuring rules for legal documents. Access to a joint clause database is supported through a software called "Contract Wizard".

3. Contracts are signed electronically by using XML Signature. Several parties may sign the same contract without managing a multitude of separate signature documents.

4. Finally, Internet-based collaboration is supported by using another tool (the "Contract Editor") that enables all parties to create contracts from existing templates, to exchange and negotiate them, and finally, to sign them as well.

As a result of the eLEGAL project, the contract editor is made available for free access under the following address: www.econtracting-zone.org.

The presenter intends to advance the further development of XML standards for legal documents in Europe. Generic tools like the contract editor and vertical standardisation efforts like LegalXML (US) or LexML (Europe) have not yet met to provide a semantics-level infrastructure for the management of electronic legal documents. As soon as media breaks can be avoided for classical contracting scenarios, a significant reduction of processing costs will be achieved.

This presentation will comprise a ca. 10 minutes presentation of the contract editor software based on a comprehensive business case.

The presentation will be given by Michael Merz. He received his PhD at computer science department at the University of Hamburg. He is author of three books on e-Business (one has been purchased over 6.500 times) and more than 40 publications on research and business topics. Michael Merz was also the technological or management head of European research and development projects such as COSMOS (1998—2000), OCTANE (2000-2002), and eLEGAL (2000-2003).