Internet Newsletter for Lawyers
September/October 2005, by Delia Venables

Caselex will serve as a European case law backbone accessing and converting the comprehensive base of case law into easy obtainable and usable knowledge for open distribution through intermediaries and directly to end-users. It will be provided as an Internet service offering national and international court decisions linked to EU Law.

Caselex is built on a public-private consortium comprising 11 key players (see below for information on the Irish and UK participants).

The consortium includes European publishers, public case law content holders and legal research centres. First Law will supply Irish judgments with an added headnote to the Caselex database. Further details of ourselves, and of WordWave, the UK participant, are given below.

Caselex, when fully operational, will be based in one of the Member States, and will provide:

- judgments and courts decision in their original language

- a summary and key words with translation for the user

- a multilingual index

- the possibility of obtaining the integral decision translated.

As such, Caselex will allow a lawyer to access and use a decision rendered by foreign courts, such as the Cour de Cassation, the Bundesverfassungsgericht or the Dutch Supreme Court. Thus Caselex will facilitate the harmonized application of European based rules (Directives, Regulation and the EU Treaty) across Europe. For example by searching on the website, one could pose a search on newspaper cartels and the site will throw up cases which have been decided by Member States on this issue. It will focus on the main areas of commercial law, such as competition law, intellectual property law and company law.

The service, which will be fully internet based, will be launched in the first quarter of 2006. The service will not be free but will be based on a subscription which would make sense for lawyers who will use it regularly. A "Pay as you go" option is also being considered.

Progress can be monitored on the Caselex website where there is also a complete list of the participants. For more information please contact the project leaders Mr Stig Marthinsen (stig.marthinsen@caselex.com) or Mr Marc de Vries (marc.devries@caselex.com).

Flore Bouhey is Managing Editor of First Law. She is a French national. She has a degree in European Law from Universite Paris/Pantheon Sorbonne and a LLM (Master) in European Law from University College Dublin.

Email Fbouhey@firstlaw.ie.

The Irish and UK Participants

Based in Ireland, they publish daily on the Internet a Legal Current Awareness Service comprising Judgments, Statutory Instruments, Acts and legal news aimed primarily for the legal profession. They also publish legal textbooks for the legal profession, corporate and consumer markets.

WordWave International, www.wordwave.co.uk

Word Wave International, based in London, is the largest court reporting and broadcast-captioning company in the world and is the emerging leader in creating searchable digital audio and video, as well as captioning Internet webcasts and conferences.

Comment from Nicholas Conway, of Wordwave

We form part of the consortium which consists of 11 contractors - 4 of them are innovative in their respective markets, ours being publishing of legal data - 4 are national public content holders, and 3 are knowledge centres.

Not only will we be freely supplying the project with English case law from 2000 (probably that year, but yet to be confirmed) but we will also be advising on and implementing all publishing and editorial processes including case summary production, meta data input and thesaurus creation.

Nicholas Conway, Business Development Manager

Email Nicholas.Conway@wordwave.co.uk, Tel 020 7421 4032.

Back to Contents.