CaseCheck is a Web 2.0 service providing an extensive collection of case summaries. Initially focussed on Scots law, it has now substantially expanded its coverage and extended its borders with the addition of over 4,000 case summaries from England, Wales and the EU from the archives of Law Brief Update.

Law Brief Update is a free email newsletter from Law Brief Publishing which provides summaries of recent England and Wales and EU case law in all the major areas of law. It is written by around 20 specialist barristers from several leading chambers and goes out once a month.

Uploading these reports to CaseCheck was a time consuming and laborious task which involved breaking the Law Brief bulletins down to their constituent parts before splitting the case summaries into distinct sections to be exported into our database. We cross-referenced the case summaries with BAILII and, where available, have linked them to the full judgments.

CaseCheck’s partnership with Law Brief means that its case summary archive now contains over 6,000 case summaries in total across England, Wales, Scotland and the EU, each written by a barrister who is an expert in their field. Case summaries are now being added at the rate of about 130 per month.

This Newsletter first covered CaseCheck shortly after its launch in October 2007. At that time it was something of a leap into the unknown but, looking back, it is one the best things we have ever done. We may still be a bit unsure as to where things are going to end up but without doubt it is going to be an interesting journey.

Free the law – starting out

Our objectives on launching CaseCheck were to:

• Make maximum use of an extensive back catalogue of case reports.
• Provide lawyers and anyone interested in the law with access to well-structured, high quality technical content irrespective of their budget.
• Complement this technical content with softer, progressive articles and comments designed to appeal to our audience.
• Begin building a legal community with clearly specified interests.
• Provide lawyers, experts and others with a platform on which to practically market their expertise to this community.
• Make some money while achieving all of the above.

The back catalogue

For a number of years, as Intersettle, we had been issuing an email newsletter comprised of case summaries to lawyers and advocates. Once issued, the content of these newsletters effectively disappeared into the inboxes of recipients far from the spiders of Google and other search engines. After separating these case summaries into distinct categories and uploading them to our database they became the initial core of CaseCheck.

Jumping forward a bit, towards the end of 2008 we agreed a deal with Tim Kevan and his team at Law Brief Publishing with a view to adding Law Brief Update case summaries (www.lawbriefupdate.com), both past and present, to CaseCheck.

By combining our own back catalogue of Scottish Court and Employment case summaries with Law Brief’s archive of materials we have created a sizeable resource comprising UK and EU wide case reports.

From the very outset almost every reaction we had to CaseCheck was positive. Lawyers, paralegals and barristers could not believe that they were able to access such well-structured, high quality content for free.

CaseCheck is built on a customised version of open source blogging platform perfectly equipped to separate and store case summaries in a clearly ordered, logical fashion. Our search engine is easy to use and returns results with ease and accuracy. These benefits perhaps explain why it is the busiest page on the site.

In CaseCheck’s first year we had over 3,700 individual registrations, 90,000 visits and regularly received visits from over 5,000 unique visitors every month. This is in spite of the fact that for the majority of its life CaseCheck has been extensively focused on the Scottish litigation market and there are only 10000 lawyers in Scotland.

With the addition of Law Brief’s content, we have enhanced CaseCheck’s functionality by adding geographical filters to the top of each case category, and to the search facility. You should check this out.

Case content is king

We are committed to placing high quality, technical content at our core and wrapping softer material around it. The case summaries on CaseCheck are provided by a tightly controlled group of contributors, each with considerable expertise in their field. We have enhanced this by adding frequent articles, gossip, interviews with leading legal figures, such as Lord Rodger of Earlsferry, and job postings. Our statistics show that our users come to the site for the case summaries first and foremost (with the weekly gossip following as a close second).

Some other companies have entered this market since we launched by creating applications which place softer content at their centre. Contributions to other sites remain relatively unmetered and the lack of quality control is, we believe, reflected in the actual content made available.

Building a legal community

We have been reading with interest articles and comments on some of the big legal publishers’ desires to create networking, or social networking, applications aimed at lawyers. The forums and blogs seem rife with suspicion of the publishers’ objectives.

I am aware I may be overstating this but CaseCheck is all about delivering high quality, technical content for free. The visitors to our site recognise this and are interested in it to such an extent that they take the time to register with us, specifying their background interests. In this way a legal community with clear needs, requirements and interests has been quietly building since we launched. We have hopes, plans and dreams for this community and believe we have the skill, ambition and imagination to make any developments in this area work for everyone. If this were not the case, what would be the point?

CaseCheck as a stage

When we launched CaseCheck my hope was that it might, if nothing else, act as a platform for to practically market my consultancy, Moore Legal Technology. It might be a coincidence but as CaseCheck has grown busier so has Moore Legal Technology.

In the past year some of Scotland’s leading law firms (Digby Brown, MacRoberts, Biggart Baillie) and chambers (The Black Stable, Compass, John Thomson) have signed up as experts with a view to using CaseCheck as their own platform.

Digby Brown, Scotland’s leading personal injury practice, were the first to come on board and in their first five months posted five expert comments on case reports. We marketed these comments for them and consequently pages displaying their logos and/or comments were viewed 21,321 times. Each time a comment was promoted in the weekly bulletin we emailed the relevant contact in Digby Brown with details of the organisations who had clicked on the link to their comment in the bulletin.

Generating revenue

The traffic picked up to a reasonable level of 3,000 visits a month within 3 months and it was at this point that we began to see if we could make any money from CaseCheck. Recruitment companies were the first to come on board, pleased with our attention to detail and the efforts we made to be as transparent as possible with our visitor statistics.

As described above a number of leading law firms and chambers came on as experts, buying exclusive rights to particular case categories on the site.

At the end of summer 2008 it was clear that we had the makings of what could be a successful business, restricted only by the fact that we were working within a relatively small jurisdiction and this led to the tie up with Law Brief Publishing. Perhaps the other restriction is time; there simply is not enough of it for all the opportunities that are available.

The economic situation has meant that legal recruitment appears to have nosedived and belts are being tightened elsewhere but where some doors have closed, others have opened. Three law firms are now speaking to us about taking a version of CaseCheck in house as their own knowledge management system with both internal and client facing aspects. The big difference between what we do and what others do is that we actually populate the application with content. In addition, our system easily manages groups, log-ins, access rights, navigation displays and, most importantly, good search functionality.

What now?

For the past few months we have been working on adding all of Law Brief’s case summaries to the site, linking them to judgements on BAILII and enhancing the site functionality. Now we have to work on raising awareness throughout the rest of the UK with a view to gaining as significant a foothold there as we have gained in Scotland.

With hard work, imagination and the wind at our back we are hopeful that CaseCheck will become something of a revelation in the legal publishing industry by giving life to peoples’ ideas as to where legal publishing could really end up going.

Stephen Moore is Director of CaseCheck.

Email stephen.moore@casecheck.co.uk.

Hilary Dupre is Business Development Manager at CaseCheck.

Email hilary.dupre@casecheck.co.uk.