The lovely Scots Law News blog has pointed out a few teensy issues on the website of the new UK Supreme Court.
I think in this case, the badgers win…
Apparently they’re asking for a solution for their badger problem. I do happen to know that, although it’s illegal to move a badger without a proper licence, or “interfere” with it and its sett, if a young badger does happen to move in somewhere inconvenient (say…under a joiners workshop), and try and establish its home there, that a period of full-volume dance music / cheesy local radio, played through speakers in that workshop while in the course of using it for the established business seems to be a good encouragement to those wandering young badgers to move along to a more serene location to establish themselves in… 😉
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”! 🙂
The current Big Idea in the legal / library blog world is the Free Legal Web (FLW). Originally mooted by Nick Holmes, the idea is to pull all of the content currently floating about the ether (legal professionals blog posts, Government information etc) into one portal. That in itself is a big enough task, but what doesn’t seem to be clear yet is…who is this Free Legal Web for?
The people involved so far seem to be legal professionals and IT specialists. The legal professionals will be working out some way of getting the useful materials together, and persuading other legal professionals that giving up their valuable time and work (such as blog postings) for this enterprise will be a worthwhile investment, and will reap them rewards in the end. The IT professionals job will be to write the scripts and programmes that will get everything together in the one place, and working well with all the other bits and pieces.
That’s all lovely (although it’s hard to tell what’s actually being done, as the discussions are going on behind an invite-only Google Group, which to me, kind of defeats the purpose of harnessing the collective intelligence of the legal and information professionals), but when this all singing, all dancing portal is up and running, who’s going to be using it? I would have thought this was a core question, to be settled right at the start, yet it doesn’t seem to have been discussed at any point.
If you’re designing a portal to work alongside the subscription legal databases like Westlaw and LexisNexis, then I assume it’s being aimed at people already working in the law, and therefore able to understand and interpret the information being presented to them there. The content will be academic / in depth, and of relevance to other members of the legal profession. Certain assumptions can be made about the level of knowledge and understanding of the user, and their grasp of the content. It also means it’s unlikely to be being used by members of the general public. Since legal professionals are likely to be persuaded into contributing to the FLW by the prospect of it eventually increasing their business through building of a reputation, this is not a good start.
If it’s designed for the general public, to allow them access to the elusive laws they’re meant to keep within, then good interpretation of the law is needed, not just access. People working in the law can forget just how difficult it is to find out what legislation means for people without access to subscription databases, information professionals to check for currency and further discussions of legal points…and even the language of legislation, while precise and succinct, can be incredibly confusing for someone with no experience of reading it, confronted with it for the first time. Content for this FLW would need a different focus – explaining the law and its impact on the general public, with references to the original case law rather than references to law reports inaccessible to the general public. Guides equivalent to first year law students introductions to the various aspects of the law would be needed. Clear signalling of whether legislation applies to all of the UK, or only the devolved areas would be essential. In other words, it would be a very different beast then the FLW designed for legal professionals.
So…is it a Professional Free Legal Web, or a Public Free Legal Web?
Dumpling in a Hanky 