Justis Publishing e-Bulletin

News

Irish double whammy

11th June 2008

In a move set to benefit practitioners on both sides of the Irish Sea, we are exclusively extending our coverage of the Irish Reports on Justis by 81 years, all the way back to 1838. We also become the first publisher to offer the authoritative case reports as printable PDFs replicating original pagination.

Sinéad Ní Chúlacháin, Editor of the Irish Reports at the Incorporated Council of Law Reporting for Ireland, said: “We are delighted that we can finally make our comprehensive archive of 170 years of reports of the Superior Courts of Ireland available in a user-friendly, accessible PDF database. The expanded Irish Reports on Justis will provide an invaluable tool and the addition of pre-independence reports will be of particular interest to other common-law jurisdictions”.

She added that the inclusion of PDFs would be a “boon to court practitioners” and that lawyers in Northern Ireland would now have access to reports from the pre-Partition Irish Courts. Given the two-way binding precedent of that era, the material will also be particularly pertinent to lawyers in England and Wales.

Extending the archive by over 7,000 cases, the expanded section of the database, along with PDFs for the full range, will be available late summer; while many PDFs of the existing cases are already in place.

Indicating its importance for Ireland, the Irish Times reported the above on 30th June.

CPD accreditation for barristers

9th July 2008

Justis Publishing has secured barrister CPD accreditation for its training sessions through the Bar Standards Board for England and Wales.

This important move sounds a ringing endorsement both for our products and for the structured, entertaining ways in which our trainer David Finch coaches users on them.

David said that he was pleased our training courses have now received the official recognition he’s been working towards for the last few months. He added: “This means that barristers will benefit from our sessions in two ways: they’ll learn how to get the most out of their subscriptions; and now the training modules will also count towards their annual CPD requirement”.

Training sessions for Justis, JustCite and J-Link are available at our offices or yours and can be requested through David at david.finch@justis.com or on +44 (0)20 7284 8117.

JustCite Digest: additional editorial content on individual records

9th July 2008

JustCite Digest, a new and exclusive feature providing case summaries from the House of Lords, the Privy Council, the Court of Appeal and the Employment Appeal Tribunal and all divisions of the High Court, is being incorporated into numerous JustCite records.

Designed to help users focus more quickly on the matters in hand for existing, fully-transcribed cases on the system, this new service provides JustCite subscribers substantive additional value at no extra cost.

The content is written by our editorial team, who follow very strict and structured guidelines: all summaries include the brief facts of the case; the purpose of the hearing; the relevant details of the case, including a short description of the reasoning of the judge; and the conclusion of the case.

1,200 Summaries are in place at the time of writing and we plan to add around 3,000 a year, having started with cases from January 2007 onwards. Very soon we should be up to early 2008, and before the end of September we hope to have written and uploaded 5 or 6,000 – and counting.

A good example can be seen in the case of Malik v Waltham Forest Primary Care Trust.

Online International Law Reports: get in quick on the pre-launch discount

9th July 2008

Our meticulous uploading of the immense and comprehensive online International Law Reports archive is ahead of schedule. With a launch date now set for the end of October, the sample data set will be available for view beforehand at all the conferences mentioned below. A 10% discount is available for all subscriptions taken out before the material goes live, so don’t miss the boat; email the Sales Team at sales@justis.com or call them on +44 (0)20 7284 8080.

Extreme makeover of websites

9th July 2008

The Justis and JustCite websites are in the beta testing phase of an extreme makeover. Though the service sides will remain unaffected, brochureware, news and general information on each site have been completely overhauled and will go live later this year.

The simple aim of our redesign has been to improve the online experience of subscribers and non-subscribers alike. Following focus group consultation (see Events section) and intense internal discussions, we’re set to deliver this through the combination of aesthetic and organizational changes we’re making, new and improved content, and simpler links between our two main sites.

With easier access to product and related news and rationalized descriptions of our existing offering, readers will not only enjoy our enhanced platform themselves; non-fee-earners, such as librarians and information managers, will have more confidence in the time-saving practice of directing their fee-earning colleagues to our sites for answers to their questions.

Readers will be emailed a launch date in due course.

Joe Bloggs, Fred Bloggs and now we blog

9th July 2008

Another upshot of our focus groups, we’re now employing blog-style reporting for our Legal News Roundups – read the latest selection. And continuing the blog trend, we’ve started to report live from conferences in a similar vein; our first entry was from Dublin’s BIALL conference last month.

And don’t forget that you can be sent many of our stories via our RSS feeds, along with additions to the content on your subscription services. RSS is the easiest way to keep up with what’s new on our sites without having to manually search them yourself.

Hints & Tips

Ever improving the usability of our services, our technical team offers the following tips this month.

Diacritical acclaim

9th July 2008

Did you know that, aiding your searches on JustCite (and, for that matter, Justis), queries such as “pleanála”, “pleanala” or “plean?la” will in general return the same results, assuming there’s nothing else on the system identical save for the sixth letter? The same is true of “schülz”, “schulz” or “sch?lz” – or any other similarly constructed query.

Knowledge of foolproof search strategies – and reliance on the underlying functionality of the service – helped our customer trainer David Finch recently when we sought to test his mettle on case and legislation retrieval. Using this year’s ICLR mooting competition as the basis of the challenge, we reported our findings in the journal Your Witness.

JustCite Search Box for iGoogle

9th July 2008

Do you use iGoogle as your personalised home page? Many of our customers do. If you’re one of them, you can now upload the JustCite Search Box as an iGoogle widget.

To do so, go to your home page, select “Add Stuff” from the top right, then choose the “Add feed” link on the bottom left, and finally paste in this URL: http://hosting.gmodules.com/ig/gadgets/file/103858977629651060731/jc-searchbox-gg.xml.

Title Talk

European expansion

3rd April 2008

Caselex, the award-winning, EU law-related precedent-finding database, has increased its specialization coverage with the recent addition of cases in information and communications technology law, media law, freedom of movement law and environmental law.

In parallel it has launched Supreme Court cases from Latvia, bringing its total case coverage to ten areas of law and 23 countries.

The other areas in which it currently holds cases are company law, competition law, consumer protection law, employment law, intellectual property law and social security law; see the list of the increasing number of jurisdictions.

Available through stand-alone subscriptions, Caselex is also discounted as a part of the Justis EU package.

Cases from the database are also now indexed on and linked from JustCite.

Article accelerator: new journals indexed by JustCite

9th July 2008

In addition to our indexing of Caselex, over 1,100 Oxford University Press journal articles from a growing list have been indexed by JustCite. 24 Leading titles – most of those shown here – have been chosen for their fit.

Furthermore, the 19 most relevant journals from this list of Blackwell titles are on their way to being indexed. Our plans to capture more like them continue, so watch this space for future announcements on deals that could significantly improve the quality of your research by setting case law and legislation in a more discursive context.

Events

Conference season’s greetings

23rd April 2008

Though we’ve barely caught our breath from an epic BIALL conference, we’ll be at numerous upcoming events, where it’ll be our pleasure to demonstrate our new (and old) material.

These conferences include: CARALL in Kingston in Jamaica from 6th July; AALL in Portland from 12th July; ILA in Rio de Janeiro from 17th August; ESIL in Heidelberg from 4th September; SLS in London from 15th September; and ALLA in Perth in Australia from 17th September.

We do hope you can make it to at least one of them. And don’t forget that we’ll have a Barrister Bear draw at each, where you’ll also be able to obtain trial login details for all of our services.

Sharp focus

9th July 2008

A few places remain for our next focus group, which you are invited to apply for via Victoria MacLean. Gathering here in London in early August, attendees will enjoy a free lunch at a swanky eatery and influence where and how we concentrate our efforts in steering Justis, JustCite and J-Link to the forefront of the next information generation.

As always, we’d like to hear from you. We value your feedback on all of our products and services so please feel free to email us with any questions, comments or requests.

Justis Publishing e-Bulletin: July 2008