Cases
How ICLR is leveraging free law
The idea that the law should be freely accessible to all the people is nothing new, but it is technology that has enabled that aspiration to be realised. ICLR has taken advantage of that to provide, alongside its reported case law subscription service, a freely accessible version of both unreported judgments and legislation. Recent developments […]
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Towards a new benchmark of digital open justice
As reported here, in April 2022 The National Archives launched its Find Case Law service, and 6 months on John Sheridan of TNA described the progress that had been made. Meanwhile, ICLR systematically monitored the publication of listed cases by TNA over its first 12 months of operation. The resulting report, Publication of listed judgments: […]
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Find Case Law – six months on
Find Case Law is a new public service providing access to court judgments and tribunal decisions. It was launched in April 2022 and has been funded and developed by The National Archives, working with the Ministry of Justice, HMCTS and the Judicial Office. We set out with three goals for the Find Case Law service: […]
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Open case law is here at last
From today judgments of the superior courts of England and Wales have a new, official home at The National Archives (TNA) which has now taken over the HMCTS publishing contract from BAILII. The Case Law website at https://caselaw.nationalarchives.gov.uk is dubbed an “Alpha”. Essentially it is a work in progress and it is best not to […]
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Court judgments to be publicly available from The National Archives
As announced in June 2021, from April 2022 significant court judgments past and present from the High Court, the Court of Appeal, the Crown Court, the House of Lords, the Supreme Court, the Privy Council, and other courts and tribunals, will be available as public records from The National Archives (TNA). At present, there are […]
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ICLR.4 and the genie in the bottle
Some years ago the editor of this Newsletter complained of the over-use of the description “artificial intelligence” in legal products: “hyping AI is unhelpful”, he said. “AI is just what computers do.” And he’s not alone in expressing scepticism about the often extravagant claims of AI. Much of the mystique around it stems from simple […]
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Recent developments at Justis
At the end of March 2019 Justis was acquired by vLex, a legal technology company founded in Barcelona with offices across the world. While we are at the beginning stages of planning what this means for both JustisOne and the vLex platform, we are able to speculate as to how Justis, a vLex company, might […]
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Open access to case law – how do we get there?
Open access to case law in England and Wales is in a very poor state of health, both in terms of the amount of case law that is freely accessible to the public and in terms of the sustainability and development of the open case law apparatus in this jurisdiction. It is true that the […]
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Open law: digital common property
Open law is the idea that public legal information should be freely available to everyone to access, use and republish. The current position in the UK differs completely as between legislation and case law. Legislation In 1996 HMSO started publishing primary and secondary legislation online, “as published” – so only accurate as at the day […]
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Major cost savings through more intelligent legal research
Legal research is regarded as one of the necessary expenses of the legal profession. It’s a task that needs to be done to ensure that arguments are robust, and to build the most comprehensive case possible, but it is a time-consuming task. This is why legal research is often delegated to trainees and newly qualified […]
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Employment tribunal judgments online
Employment tribunal judgments are now available online on GOV.UK at www.gov.uk/employment-tribunal-decisions. Previously, in order to read a first instance judgment, you had to hope that one of the parties published it or that the judiciary website considered it to be of sufficient importance to publish or to take a trip to the central register and […]
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Online publishing news
Legislation.gov.uk Following the promotion of John Sheridan to Digital Director at The National Archives, Matthew Bell has been appointed the new Head of Legislation Services. A law graduate from Manchester University, Matt started his career in legal publishing in 1999 when he joined Sweet and Maxwell to help establish Westlaw UK. By the time he […]
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