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Fill-in-the-blank templates are provided for easy searching but you can also carry out advanced searches using natural language or terms and connectors.
Legislation is consolidated and appears in full text. You can view historic versions of legislation back to 1992, and, with the Analysis tool, you can see commencement information, citations of cases that refer to the particular provision you are viewing and details of related legislative provisions.
A popular feature is the Case Locator tool which sets out everything you need to know about a case in one place including a digest and history, along with links to cited cases, legislation and relevant journals.
Another useful feature is Westclip, an automatic search tool that you can set to your own specification to provide you with details of new developments in a particular area of the law. You can receive Westclip alerts by email or when you next log in.
Both Westlaw UK Scots Law and Westlaw UK Scots Crime are accessed via www.westlaw.co.uk. Both services are charged on a fixed price subscription basis, with the price varying according to the size and type of organisation.
As with all Westlaw UK services, there is a free 24-hour Customer Support line, manned by staff who can assist with legal and technical issues.
For further information on Westlaw UK Scots Law and Westlaw UK Scots Crime or to arrange a free trial, call the Customer Support line on 0800 028 2200.
User interface: The screen is fairly well set out, in a clear fashion with templates and menus guiding the eye of the user to the most popular functions. A cynic might well suggest, however, that such guidance does tend to lead an unwary user to the more expensive operations while the cheaper practices are often more time consuming or complicated.
Searching: The most obvious method of searching is to use the template boxes on the Welcome screen, which is easy to learn and to teach. In addition, the Advanced Search option allows for Boolean searching while the less initiated can use the natural language option to simply ask the database a question. Strangely, however, this layman’s option is rather hidden in the Advanced Search screen.
A particularly helpful feature is the Locate option, which allows the user to manipulate search results, limiting and adding additional terms for example, without losing your original results to which you can always return.
In addition to straightforward searching, much information can be accessed through tables of contents, the format of which (expanding information by clicking on a plus, retracting by clicking on the minus) will be familiar to many, particularly if they have used any Books on Screen product, and easy to learn if not.
The full text of journals, cases and news articles undoubtedly reduce the need to resort to interlibrary loans and external sources for research, particularly for English sources to which a Scots law firm may not naturally subscribe. Due to its limited coverage of Scottish sources, however, it is unlikely that great cost savings can be made by reducing the numbers of paper subscriptions taken by a Scots firm – these full text journals are more likely to be additional sources for your firm, not duplication of existing subscriptions.
The content in the UK service is certainly impressive but this is, of course, reflected in the price of the package. A subscription to Westlaw UK is a major investment for any firm and, indeed, is only being marketed at the larger enterprises in the Scottish market. The recent introduction of a non-usage based subscription does take the pressure off users to a certain extent but it is clear that Scottish firms simply cannot justify expenditure at the levels of the City firms on research products.
That being the case, Westlaw have provided alternatives for the Scottish market: Westlaw Scots Law and Westlaw Scots Crime. These are priced more modestly and are targeted at the small to medium Scots law firm. It is the publishers’ stated intention, however, not to add too much content to either of these products in order to maintain the lower pricing levels. The aim of this policy is to offer a real choice to the purchaser based on the level of content desired and the level of expenditure available. The question is, therefore, whether this limited content is sufficient for the needs of the Scottish practitioner?
Such broad content coverage is not, however, provided in the full text cases and journals available. Only SLT reports back to 1930 and some unreported transcripts are provided in full text while there are no full text journals at all. This, however, is not a fatal flaw in my opinion. Most practitioners will have access to hard copy cases and journals either through existing subscriptions or membership of professional libraries. If the lack of full text materials can keep the subscription costs to a reasonable level, this may be an acceptable compromise.
The aspect of the SL service, however, which may have taken this compromise too far, is the content of the indices: the current awareness database, case law citator/locator and legal journals index. These indices are “slices” of the main Westlaw UK databases, filtering through only those items deemed to have “Scottish interest” whilst items with UK wide interest and jurisdiction are often filtered out before reaching the Scottish user. Although we in Scotland are rightly proud of our separate legal system, it is unrealistic to ignore the fact that UK wide developments and information impact on our laws and, hence, on our research. To have a purely Scottish citator for cases and journal article index means to me that the SL service cannot be used as the sole research tool in a firm and would need to be supplemented by the good old hard copy citators or an additional subscription to a product such as Current Legal Information. This, of course, would impact on the affordability of the product.
Westlaw is on safer ground with its other Scottish product as the market for criminal information demands more specific information with fewer requirements for broad coverage in the indices. Such a niche market is well suited to Westlaw’s practice of “slicing” information from the main database and repackaging it with extras.
In this case these extras are impressive, being the full text commentary taken from the Renton and Brown’s Criminal Procedure 6th edition and Renton and Brown’s Criminal Procedure Legislation. In addition, the package can be priced on the number of criminal lawyers in a practice, rather than on the size of the entire firm thereby making the service a more affordable tool.
Gillian Leslie is Librarian at Biggart Baillie. Email gleslie@biggartbaillie.co.uk
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