Internet Newsletter for Lawyers |
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This new free service at www.courtdiary.co.uk gives barristers' chambers, individual barristers, firms of solicitors, prosecuting authorities and solicitors' agents a way of finding out who is covering a particular court at a particular time and who would be available to cover other cases in the same court. The system also allows barristers' chambers to show that they have barristers available to take on new work. All Crown Courts, Magistrates Courts and Youth Courts are covered in the scheme.
Each person using the service has to first register on the site, either as barristers' chambers, an individual barrister, a firm of solicitors, a solicitor's agent or a prosecuting authority. Barristers' chambers, individual barristers and freelance solicitor agents are provided with a page called "My diary" in which he/she indicates the court to be attended and the time of the listing. Solicitors, Prosecuting Authorities or other chambers, can then look up a particular court through a page called "Courts Diary" and find out whether anyone is attending. As well as indicating particular courts attended, participants can indicate their availability to attend a court, classifying themselves according to various categories in the "Who is available" sections.
The service is run by Robin Driscoll, himself a barristers' clerk, who understands the daily grind (and wasted phone calls) of finding someone to attend a particular court at the last moment and also the fact that barristers, once attending a court for one case, are often available to take on other work as well.
A company called Courtel Communications Ltd (CCL) provides free access to lists from the Royal Courts of Justice, Crown Courts and key London County Courts at its site, www.courtserve.net.
In addition, CCL offer a subscription service called CourtServe 2000 to criminal chambers which allows users to search on case numbers, courts, barristers' names or any other word, and track their cases through the courts. This service, provided by software that links into the main barristers case management systems from Meridian and Ace means, for example, that clerks can advise a barrister as soon as his/her case is listed.
These lists are provided by an arrangement with the Court Service. Court listings officers send the lists electronically to the CCL hub for formatting in its software into printable and searchable format (and traditional two column style for the RCJ lists). Once processed by CCL and delivered to customers via the software, the listings are essentially "marked up" with the chambers' own information. The subscription service also includes the confidential Crown Court lists that cannot be published on the web.
Apparently, more than 5,000 people in the legal community visit the site every day for the free access. Another 6,000 a day rely on CourtServe subscription services and around 80% of the criminal sets around the country already use this service. Future plans include the collection and delivery in similar electronic fashion of county court lists across England and Wales.
This site, at www.courtcommentary.com offers access to the latest judgments in the High Court and Court of Appeal and most of these are free. The versions online are web-transcriptions of the full text of handed-down judgments collected by their reporter from the courts. There are free case listings for each judgment containing the editor's summary of the "ratio" of the case, with details of judges, courtroom, parties and counsel. The majority of the listed judgments are free downloads and others are charged at a very modest £1.95. The reports are formatted for easy viewing on screen, and for printing, saving and editing. Based in London, CourtCommentary.com is a legal news and information service owned by Bear House Setters, a partnership specialising in electronic publishing. This is a very good source of current and recent judgments, with information usually appearing here before other free sources.
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