Internet Newsletter for Lawyers
November/December 2005, by Delia Venables

Web Resources and Knowledge Management
by Derek Sturdy

Lawyers increasingly want to ensure that all work is done to best practice standards and that lawyers of less than lifetime experience can carry out complex work to very high standards, using know-how inherited from their elders. They want to be able to reuse materials which encapsulate professional experience and knowledge. As legal organisations devote more investment to document reuse and to document preparation for reuse, they start to realise the potential for integration with online resources to deliver real benefits. However, this is not as easy as it sounds and some of the problems are described below.

The issue is updating

Legal knowledge suffers from three unusual difficulties:
  • legal knowledge that is right, and advice based on it that is sound, at a given time, can become respectively wrong and unsound more or less overnight;
  • the changes in legislation and case law (primary law) and regulations, that bring this about, are effectively random, although notice of them is normally available;
  • the UK, unlike many other jurisdictions, does not codify legislation, but instead issues a mass of SIs, amending, bringing into force, repealing or amplifying legislation; it can be quite hard to find out exactly what the current law is on any topic.

    Engineers, say, or even doctors, don’t really have these problems. For them, an existing best-practice, proven solution to a problem will still work, even if a recent technical improvement means that a better solution is actually available. So lawyers have to attend more strictly to the problem of updating the foundations of their know-how and legal knowledge than most other professions.

    The traditional methods of handling this issue rely on reading the legal journals relevant to a lawyer’s discipline, receiving and reading updates from bodies such as the Law Society, and, in the larger firms, receiving and reading bulletins prepared by information staff or support lawyers paid to do the work. However, the arrival of updating information does not coincide with the need for the new knowledge in the course of daily work. In addition, each lawyer has to know that the update has been prepared, and remember at least that they have read it or glanced at it, in order to be able to apply the update to their work when it is actually relevant.

    Legal publishers have done their best to provide the data on which these methods depend, including updating services of various kinds (“push” technologies). However, these have their downside, where a deluge of randomly timed pieces of information arrives and the miserable recipient has to decide what to do with it - file it? store it in email folders where it might get lost? read it instead of carrying on earning fees? As a result, yet more technology has been developed to solve the problem caused by push technologies and random updates, such as email searching. This might actually be seen as an expensive way to compound the problem. But what is the alternative?

    Providing the update at the point of use

    This is obviously the thing to do. The provision of updates at the point of use requires access to a real-time resource, which today will be web-based. There are two methods, which need not be mutually exclusive:
  • outsource the provision of legal know-how, precedents, etc to a publishing organisation that has the dedicated staff to ensure that all the legal knowledge is up to date;
  • find a way to tie the changes in primary law, and commentary on them, directly to your know-how.

    The obvious choice for outsourcing is the Practical Law Company (PLC), www.practicallaw.com; they have the specialists in place and they concentrate on know-how rather than legal information. However, the range of legal work types they cover is by no means comprehensive and also, such services are expensive.

    The second method is quite easy to do in places like the US, where the form of case report citations is standardised, where cases rarely have more than one report citation unless there is a federal dimension, and where cases are reported in accessible electronic media like LexisNexis and Westlaw very quickly. Automatic case finders work well and lawyers use the proper citation forms because it is easy and because the cases are reported quickly.

    It is much harder to do this sort of thing in the UK. Case report citation forms vary at the whim of publishers and historical accident, multiple report series often report the same hearing, and the most interesting period of a case hearing’s significance (the first few weeks after the judgment is handed down) is normally also the period during which the hearing is not reported and therefore does not possess a report citation. Lawyers then compound the problem by omitting the standard citation given to cases at the hearing, by using various nicknames for cases, and employing language such as “the new regulations” or “the following section of the 1990 Act”, instead of “SI 2005 346” or “Town and Country Planning Act 1990, s.56”. The result is that automatic primary law reference finders cannot work very well for internal know-how. In addition, most are tied to the offerings of a particular publisher.

    As a result, most know-how collections are updated by hand, with all the expense and inefficiency this implies. The problem is compounded by the fact that most City firms will be paying expensive PSL salaries to have precisely the same thing done - the application of new primary law and regulation to their know-how - and the primary law and regulation changes being considered, if not the know-how, are all the same. Clearly there are opportunities for reducing the redundant elements of this work and reducing costs. Two approaches are gaining ground.

    1. Using citators in the web-enabled office

    The first approach is the ongoing development of central authority files, summarising in a standardised way the metadata about primary law that is needed for updating purposes. Such information has been available for years in published citators, but these are not always easy to search automatically and have proved hard to link to internal know-how. There are many reasons for this. Suffice it to say that in most cases the programming costs are very significant and beyond the reach of all but the largest law firms, the accuracy limited, and the lifetime of the resulting applications short as publishers and their customers alike change their formats and infrastructures.

    The most obvious new commercial service is the development of the JustCite database, www.justcite.com, by Justis, which is a digest of “what affects what” in a subscription service. As a simple database without commentary, JustCite provides what many think of as 95 per cent of the value of the information, which is first, knowing that something has been affected, and secondly, providing the links to both the thing that makes the effect and the thing that is affected. Examples of the effects logged by JustCite are the SIs that implement Directives, hearings which are appealed, hearings which are distinguished, followed, etc in other hearings, sections of Acts which are amended or repealed by SIs, and SIs which affect other SIs, in all cases providing publisher- independent linking to the fuller texts.

    2. Linking to specific resources

    The second approach is the development of specific linking services which enable the relevant link to be made to approved, specified sources without the need to remember passwords and logons and the vagaries of each different service. There are two sorts of destination sites:
  • comprehensive and predictable for specific data - in other words, if you know the piece of information such as a case or SI which you want to connect to, you can know whether the destination holds the information or not without doing a search;
  • eclectic - the site may or may not have any particular piece of information.

    The most commonly used eclectic legal sites in the UK are probably Lawtel and BAILII. Examples of predictable sites are the All England Reports cases, which are all uniquely on the LexisNexis Butterworths service; so if you have any All ER cite, then that is the place to go and you will find it. Similarly, the Fleet Street Reports cases are all uniquely on the Westlaw UK service, so if you have any FSR cite, you will find the case on Westlaw UK. Such sites normally allow the creation of the URL to find the particular piece of information by means of a formula unique to the site, so that if you have the necessary metadata, and the necessary programming abilities, you can build the correct URL in real time using the formula. The advantage here is that if the publisher changes the way their site works, you just change the one formula, not all the links.

    With eclectic sites, the linking process effectively has to do a search on the site to see if what is needed is there. Carrying out an accurate search automatically on such sites may not be easy to accomplish.

    There are two techniques for taking the user to the required resources:

  • search integration, of various levels of complexity and sophistication;
  • linking straight from the metadata in the authority file or citator, and constructing the URL in real time from the metadata to link to the precise resource that is relevant.

    A technique which is considered unsatisfactory is the hard-coded link, which is constructed by highlighting a piece of text in a document, and creating a specific link to a URL (the address of, say, the explanatory note of an SI on HMSO). Publishers and other resources change their sites from time to time and the work done in finding the destination and creating the link is then wasted.

    Search integration, supplied by such sterling organisations as Magus Research, www.magusresearch.com and Solcara, www.solcara.com, can be used to handle the particular problems of the eclectic sites, and it has other specific uses:

  • it can be set up to visit specified sites for specified purposes: for example, the use of a taxonomy can direct the search integration service to specific sites which have been associated with specific terms;
  • it also can visit only approved sites, thereby cutting down on the amount of unwanted noise generated by, say, a Google search.

    Direct linking - constructing the URL in real time - is the hallmark of the JustCite and the Tikit Know-How System applications, www.tikit.com/km, and in both cases it has been developed to deal with links to primary law, that are only weakly, if at all, handled by search integration techniques. These direct linking applications know which citations are to be found on which sites, how to perform silent authentications where the sites allow it, so that users do not have to remember logons and passwords, and work from rule books to construct URLs in real time, so that they have low updating maintenance costs.

    It is still the case, however, that somebody has to supervise the linking of particular pieces of text in reuseable documents and guides, to the specific pieces of primary law and regulation. Although software such as Justis’ Link Studio can help, no software currently available can handle all the vagaries of the language used in internal knowledge resources and some references will be missed. The nettle of editorial involvement must therefore be grasped, whether this work is outsourced, as is the normal case with the Tikit Know-How application, or performed in-house, as is the normal case with those who employ the Justis applications.

    Big firms and little firms

    A very few large firms represent over half the total legal fees earned in the UK, and have a full supporting infrastructure, while at the other end of the size scale, a multitude of one-person operations or very small organisations have to consider every expense, whether of time or money, very carefully against the benefits it might bring. For these lawyers, whether solicitors in very small law firms or barristers in chambers, KM might consist of their own best practice, as exemplified by recent files on their personal computers, precedents out of “the books”, and their variably competent access to a smattering of free web sites. The individuals concerned seldom have the combination of expertise and spare time required to link, let alone to integrate, their “last time I did this” documents to external web sites of any kind, and web resources are searched, or looked up, by hand as required.

    Slightly larger organisations are moving into the integration province which used to be restricted to the largest firms. The use of skilled support staff is no longer confined to the largest firms as the economic benefits of updateable, reuseable materials start to be realised.

    There is therefore an increasingly obvious advantage in the “one-to-many” mode, both in re-usable document preparation and processing work, and in know-how publishing, citator and authority file maintenance. This will increase as the new technologies start to deliver their promise. As usual, the smaller players - PLC, Justis, Tikit, InterWoven, and so on - are currently running ahead of the larger players such as LexisNexis, Thomson, SAP and Documentum.

    After a Cambridge doctorate and a number of years in industrial process control, Derek Sturdy joined Legal Information Resources in 1991. Together with Christine Miskin he produced the first legal electronic metadata databases (especially Legal Journals Index). When LIR was taken over by Sweet & Maxwell, they launched Current Legal Information, and then created the editorial and database systems for Westlaw UK. In 2000, Derek founded Granite & Comfrey to provide effective KM systems for law firms. This is now part of Tikit, www.tikit.com the largest integrator of legal systems in the UK, where Derek continues his work in legal KM.
    Email derek.sturdy@tikit.com.

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