ICLR.3
ICLR.3 reflects a fundamental shift in the provision of public legal information. Although it could be described as a “freemium” service – offering both free access to all users and premium content to paying subscribers – such a description fails to reflect the way ICLR’s whole approach to the selection and provision of case law has been turned around.
As well as offering an ever-larger volume of both open data and value-added content, the new platform has been through-designed in a complete rethink of how all this information is presented. From a home page with optimised, targeted feeds of new content, to an index page that presents a complete summary of information relating to each case, to a document view that offers uninterrupted textual reading alongside navigational links and related information, the site has the full range of user needs in mind.
Nearly everything about the service is open and free to use, from the searching of cases and statutes, via the display of results and citator information (with links to content elsewhere), to the reading of judgments and statutes in the public domain. For more recent cases, ICLR’s own case summaries are also free to read and download. It is only at the point of delivery of subscriber-only content that anything resembling a paywall intervenes. Even then, there remains the option to pay as you go, with a fixed PDF charge per case.
Our intention with ICLR.3 is to provide (in the words of the original Apple Mac’s iconic advertising campaign) “a legal information service for the rest of us”.
Find out more about ICLR.3 and sign up for a free trial at www.iclr.co.uk.
Paul Magrath, Paul.Magrath@iclr.co.uk
Justis
Over the past few months, not only have Justis been continuing to develop new technology, but we have also been working on securing new partnerships to provide more content to practitioners around the world. Justis believe that by combining content and technology, both legal practitioners and law schools can conduct more effective and efficient research.
In June this year, Justis announced that its flagship research platform JustisOne will be the exclusive home of Carilaw, adding over 44,000 cases from 18 jurisdictions to the already vast collection of cases housed by Justis.
Hon Mr. Justice Adrian Saunders, Caribbean Court of Justice said “I am thrilled to learn that the University of the West Indies has recently entered into a relationship with Justis Publishing. This will certainly result in the enhancement of the CariLaw platform and be a tremendous boost to the development of our Caribbean jurisprudence.”
Additionally, 6,000 New Zealand cases were added to JustisOne this September in a partnership which made Justis the exclusive provider of The Law Report case law collection. Founder Melissa Perkin said “We at The Law Report are delighted to have gone into partnership with Justis to enable a much wider range of users from different jurisdictions easier access to pertinent information from The Law Report collection, by using the unique search and analysis tools on the Justis platform.”
Justis have also been focused on ensuring that the most authoritative Irish cases are made accessible to practitioners, the courts and academics well before the availability of the cases in hard copy. A recent agreement with the Incorporated Council of Law Reporting for Ireland (ICLR) has resulted in recent judgments being made available on JustisOne as soon as their editorial steps have been completed.
See further www.justis.com/blog/.
Matt Terrell, matt.terrell@justis.com
Bloomsbury Law Online
The internet is a more hazardous environment now than ever before and hardly a day goes by without some new story of hacking or cybercrime taking place. Consequently, we moved the entire Bloomsbury Professional Online site to https in Summer 2017. Interestingly, and perhaps somewhat counter-intuitively, making all site traffic https produces a noticeable performance gain – there’s an illuminating demo available at www.httpvshttps.com.
Perhaps one of the more remarkable findings since we moved to a fully responsive design last year has been the number of users using smartphones as a device to access the research content on our site: one in five new visitors are connecting from a smartphone: somewhat surprising for those of us who still think of a phone as primarily a device to make phone calls. Consequently we have worked with our developers to ensure that all the tools available on the desktop research platform are also available to users who prefer to connect from their phones.
Since launching Bloomsbury Law Online in November 2016, we have had clear feedback that the legal market requires PDF downloads paginated like the print original of all material. We are now about two thirds of the way through the project to deliver that with more than 4,000 PDFs now available for download.
Finally, here at Bloomsbury Professional we have a wealth of precedent material distributed across our portfolio but we had feedback from our customers that it was sometimes difficult to track down that specific boilerplate paragraph or model election that was embedded somewhere in the online library. Consequently, we are working to markup our data so that a user need only click a link on a product homepage “Looking for a Precedent?” to surface all the precedent material in that product.
Visit www.bloomsburylawonline.com.
Jubriel Hanid, Jubriel.Hanid@bloomsbury.com
Law Pod UK
1 Crown Office Row have launched a new regular podcast, Law Pod UK, to discuss developments across all aspects of civil and public law in the UK.
The content is interview-based. I present it and discuss with various members of chambers legal developments and cases of the moment; sometimes arising from a post that has been written on the UKHR blog, sometimes free standing.
Recent interviews have been with Marina Wheeler QC about the way the courts are approaching the problem of radicalisation in family context and using TPIMs; and with David Hart about the future of environmental law post Brexit.
You can subscribe via iTunes or Audioboom.
Rosalind English, rslndenglish@gmail.com
