Horses for Courses & Value for Money
by Oriole Newgass
This article originated from a presentation I gave at Online 2004. Most of the
resources covered will already be familiar, but I hope that the context of
seeking specialist resources as affordable alternatives to the expensive major
players might offer a new view...
Does your law firm, chambers or faculty have an unlimited information
budget? Can you get whatever you want rubber-stamped by Accounts? No?
Well, join the club - most of us today have to find new ways to live within our
shrinking means. Budgets in many law libraries are being cut or frozen, so
researching the best-value resources really makes sense.
Keeping ahead of the game means:
- becoming familiar with all the free resources
- accessing them frequently; though they change & improve continually, you
won’t be notified of improvements: these providers don’t have marketing
budgets
- visiting Sarah Carter's LawLinks, library.kent.ac.uk/library/lawlinks and
the Delia Venables website www.venables.co.uk regularly for news of what's new.
Free Resources
Some of the major free resources to track are:
- BAILII – www.bailii.org - British & Irish Legal Information Institute - the
groundbreaking “free to all” case law & legislation resource started five years
ago. BAILII has now grown up to be an invaluable resource, with masses of
English, Scottish and Irish case law and legislation, some unobtainable
elsewhere. BAILII repays frequent revisiting: improvements are made all the
time and new data added. If BAILII is new to you, don’t go in once, fail to find
what you’re after, and give up on it. Next time you visit you could be amazed
at how useful it has become.
- EISIL – www.eisil.org - Electronic Information Service for International Law -
a new international law resource, sponsored by the American Society for
International Law & funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. EISIL
comes highly recommended by Sarah Carter of the University of Kent’s
Templeman Library (see LawLinks, above). EISIL covers a wide spectrum of
international legal issues and cross-border legislation, including air, space,
water, communications, transport, conventions and treaties.
- THE COURT SERVICE - www.courtservice.gov.uk - competes well with the
commercial services and has judgments given in courts barely covered by
them. In addition it offers Practice Directions, Court Costs information and a
great range of Tribunals reports, including EAT, Finance & Tax, Immigration,
Lands, Pensions, Residential Property, Social Security & Child Support and
Transport. Also excellent for Supreme Court Daily Lists.
- European Courts - curia.eu.int - full text case law from the European Court
of Justice and Court of First Instance.
- WebJCLI - webjcli.ncl.ac.uk – Web Journal of Current Legal Issues from
the University of Newcastle. An almost unique resource, a free, full-text
journal online, it tends to get forgotten, but is well worth book-marking for
research and general interest.
"Affordable" Subscription Resources
Subscription services in the affordable range for general law and case law include these:
- Infolaw - www.infolaw.co.uk from Nick Holmes. It’s been around for a while
but there have been huge improvements recently, and it now has much more
coverage, new features and good searchability. Its search tool, Lawfinder,
works with Google to produce an excellent rapid retrieval to over 95,000 UK
legal documents and other resources available on the web. New too is
Lawlinker - similar to Context’s JustCite, but it comes as part of your
subscription. Infolaw offers a respectably long trial subscription to enable you
to make up your mind. Genuinely good value for money, and well
recommended.
- Justis from Context – www.justis.com - massive collection of law reports and
legal information with a unique plus. Though reasonably expensive, Justis is
the only major system allowing one-concurrent-user–based subscribing. So
the subscription is based not on partner-numbers, but only on the number of
concurrent users you think need to be online simultaneously. Much fairer -
because partners are seldom the end-users, and it’s unlikely that everyone
will want to use Justis at the same time.
- Two for current case law: Casetrack www.casetrack.com from Smith Bernal,
a superior next-day court reporting service (particularly good for monitoring
the first appearance of urgently needed judgments); and Lawindexpro at
www.lawindexpro.co.uk - good for current cases and forthcoming case-lists.
Subject Specific Resources
Finding subject-specific resources makes good financial sense when your
practice is concentrated into a few areas. For property law specialists Estates
Gazette Interactive at www.egi.co.uk gives access to all Estates Gazette
publications – journal articles, law reports and case summaries. Price-wise
this is an absolute bargain which could also save on buying EGLR hard
copies. Information staff tend to prefer it, but end-user lawyers will always go
for PLC Property property.practicallaw.com if given the choice. So also for
company law: computer-literate lawyers will opt for PLC Company Law -
www.practicallaw.com - every time. (PLC always try to sell direct to lawyers,
bypassing the library/information department, but this can work to your
advantage if it doesn’t come out of the library budget!)
For family lawyers Jordans Family Law is essential. Also from Jordans: Law
Reports Online, and the Civil Court Service (an alternative to Westlaw’s
White Book). All are accessed via www.jordanpublishing.co.uk. News is just
in too regarding TSO’s Consolidated Civil Procedure Rules Online. This is
expected in February 2005 and will be the first consolidated CPR service
online. Keep watch at www.tso.co.uk for more news.
Free Email Alerts
And always keep up to date for free. There are some excellent free e-mail
newsletters and alerts which can be obtained without charge by registering for them from these sites:
Golden Rules
Finally – the golden rules again:
- research all possibilities first – get trial subscriptions (almost always possible)
- don’t pay for what you won’t use
- make the most of every free resource
- competition is good for you: deals can always be made!
After 22 years information work, including nine in London law firms, Oriole
Newgass left the capital in 2004 to set up Legal-IM
www.legal-im.co.uk, an
independent company offering information management, consultancy and
training, based in the South West.
Email oriole@legal-im.co.uk.
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