Category: Scots law

CaseCheck expands coverage

CaseCheck issued this press release a few days ago, and it’s a great service, so I thought it was worth popping on here:

CaseCheck Launches UK-wide Service – Free Access to over 5000 legal case summaries and more

Scotland’s leading online legal information provider, CaseCheck, has linked up with Law Brief Publishing. This collaboration with the English legal publisher will give users free access to a database of more than 5,000 case summaries. The resource is popular with the Scottish legal community and has ambitious plans for the rest of the UK and beyond.

The free web-based resource now covers all major areas of law across the UK and EU, and includes expert opinions covering a wide variety of specialist subjects. Visit www.casecheck.co.uk to find out more.

CaseCheck is the brainchild of legal geek, Stephen Moore, who gave up practicing law for a career in legal information technology. Moore combines his work as a technology consultant with a number of leading law firms, with development of the CaseCheck concept.

Moore explains: “As soon as we launched we began getting great feedback. In spite of there only being 10,000 lawyers in Scotland the traffic picked up really quickly. Revenue grew on the back of that traffic and we became committed to seeing how we could develop the idea into other jurisdictions. It was just a question of finding the right partner.”

Law Brief Publishing was set up by Tim Kevan, a barrister, writer and entrepreneur. Commenting on the tie-up, Kevan said: “From the start Stephen really impressed us with his dynamic and innovative approach. CaseCheck has the potential to be an extremely important application and we are delighted to be helping with that. In return Stephen is able to give our extensive back catalogue of case reports a new audience.”


I love the fact that Stephen Moore is a self described “legal geek”! 🙂

JLSS Survey

I went to look at the news on the JLSS site, and decided I’d agree to take part in the survey – I thought I might be able to give some feedback about the removal of the Library / research area, and why it should be redesigned. After all, it did say “We would greatly appreciate it if you could complete a short survey to help us improve the Journal website. Click here to have your say”…

Instead, I got presented with the most random of surveys:

Erm…hello?
Exactly what has my home ownership status, and my hot beverage choice got to do with the website redesign, and the missing Library usefulness?!?

Is someone there taking the pee? Were they scrambling to find a way to fill up SurveyMonkeys default setting of 10 questions, and threw in the tea/coffee option?

Come on JLSS, you did an otherwise great redesign of the website (we’re ignoring the Library ‘thing’ for just now), can you please not let it all down at the end with a silly, unfocussed survey?!

Selected Session Cases available online

The Scottish Council of Law Reporting, publishers of the Session Cases, have made selected cases available for free from their website.

In their own words:

For some years the Scottish Council of Law Reporting has provided the law-teaching universities in Scotland with a CD-ROM containing cases selected from the Session Cases® archive to distribute as a learning aid to their students. Technologies change, and the Council is pleased to provide a database of Scottish cases selected from their archive as an open access resource.

The only problem I’m having is finding out a listing or index of what these selected cases are, but hey, for allowing even some access to an otherwise subscriber access only database, I’m not complaining!

New JLSS website

You turn your back for 5 minutes…

Last week, the Law Society of Scotland launched a redesigned website for the Journal of the Law Society of Scotland, with minimal (if any) fanfare. Well, there may well have been a fanfare, but as I’m not a solicitor and so therefore not on their emailing list, I only found out when I went to check up on their news area last week. It doesn’t even list it as something of note in their own News area…no press releases to The Firm Magazine, nor Scottish Legal News…is this some sort of terrible secret, not to be publicised to the world at large?

This is how it used to look (Feb 2008 image from Internet Archive):

This is how it looks now:

It is, however, a bit of a good news / bad news situation.

So we’ll start cheerfully with The Good News:

It’s pretty, it’s shiny, and looks much more sleek and modern.

The JLSS now has blogs, yay! There are links from the homepage to both the Editor’s blog, and the Law Society’s blog too.

http://www.journalonline.co.uk/Blogs/

The Editor’s blog launched on the 3rd October, which makes me think that that is possibly when the website was relaunched. Although there’s no mention of the shiny new website in any of the three posts so far.

There’s now an RSS feed for the News section, which means I won’t have to remember to go in every few days to check to see I’ve not missed anything.

Also good – lots more content from each issue of JLSS is now available on the site.

Now…The Bad.

The Archive (used to be Library) area of the site is the part I use most, and therefore also the part where I see the changes most.

The current issue of the JLSS showing is the August issue. Previously, it would show the current issue, which in this case would be the September issue. The appearance of the newest issue at the top of the site gave us an idea whether our copy had gone missing or not. And as the solicitors always seem to get their copies before the Library subs turned up, we were able to refer to the current issue pdf when we got the familiar requests saying “X told me Y would be in the Journal this month, is it?”. Now, we can’t do that.

Wait…as I wrote this I double checked the site again – it’s now the September issue showing. So, in the new way of working, does that mean the ‘new’ old issue appearing means the ‘new’new issue is due out, ie October? Follow that convoluted sentence if ya can!

The search option is just plain stupid. Again, a before and after comparison.

December 2007:

And now:

See that glowing box in the top right? Yup, that’s what used to be that lovely, restrictable search option, with 40+ categories to narrow it down by, the option to restrict it only to Journal material…

Now, you search all content, whether you like it or not. Thankfully, so far the magical “quotation marks” are helping, as you can see from my “company law” versus company law search results below:

Also, it’s not helpful to not show the source of the results (news item, JLSS article?) in the returned hits. It means I have to click in to everything see if it’s just a newsy snippet, or a ‘proper’ result from the Journal. And what’s the ranking of the result? By relevance? Date? I have no idea, it doesn’t say.

In other words, they removed a good, accurate search tool, and replaced it with…well…meh.

So, JLSS, whoever you got to design your new website, could you ask them to put back the useful parts of it, while leaving the shiny new look? Kthxbai.