No missing links

By Alistair King, Justis Publishing

What links Westlaw, LexisNexis and Justis? And BAILII, Casetrack and Informa Law? And PLC, Canada Law Book and Australia’s RMIT Publishing? Oh, and the Singapore Academy of Law, CUP, OUP and Blackwells? (Don’t think the list doesn’t go on, but an 88-item roll call does not make an enticing start to a feature).

An obvious answer is that they’re all legal publishers with collective content that represents a gigantic chunk of recorded common law worldwide, along with legislation and journal articles.

But there’s a more specific and, dare I say, exciting answer that I’m after. If you’d like a clue, consider a literal interpretation of the word ‘links’.

Readers of my last article on JustCite Link Studio and the JustCite Toolbar might now be on to something.

But the focus of this piece isn’t on the labour-saving offshoots of JustCite in the JustCite Tools range; it’s on the uniquely provider-neutral citator itself, which has recently been boosted by two major developments.

One relates to the new Westlaw platform, the other to LexisNexis’s complete portfolio of online legal titles. We’ll come back to those after a reminder of what JustCite is and why it’s making countless practitioners’ and researchers’ lives easier.

Accessed by the majority of barristers in England and Wales, and a rising number of top-flight law firms, JustCite has three key functions: it indexes an increasingly wide variety of case law citations, statutes and journal articles. It provides deep links from these into the full-text material of numerous third-party publishers and data providers and each JustCite record offers a bank of citatory information. For cases, this includes legislation and earlier cases cited, how each case or statute was treated in court, and where that case itself was subsequently cited. This latter point is crucial if you’d planned to rely on something that was later overruled.

And none of this even touches on the versatility of JustCite’s search and results handling, which have led many practitioners and researchers to use it as an umbrella search of other databases.

Sue Alcock is the librarian at Ashfords LLP, a full-service law firm in Exeter. Relatively new into the legal library scene, Alcock found she was “delving straight into the usual online services and searching for cases and other material using instinct, experience and training”.

But things have started to change. “More and more I find I am using JustCite as the first port of call,” she says. “A good example happened this morning, when we were trying to track down an unreported case. Checking on JustCite gave a reference to Kemp and going to our online version of Kemp we were able to find some relevant information. I can recommend JustCite and am pleased to learn that they will be adding more links to Westlaw and Lexis.”

Westlaw’s association with JustCite goes back several years. Cases and legislation that can be found as full-text documents on Westlaw have been indexed by JustCite for just as long, as have the related clusters of citatory information that fill each JustCite record. But since the launch of Westlaw’s new platform a couple of years ago, technical reasons prevented JustCite from deep-linking into Westlaw UK. Citations for which Westlaw held full-text material still included references to Westlaw, alongside the likes of Justis and LexisNexis, on the dropdown menus for relevant citations. But improvements were needed.

So underpinning JustCite’s claim to be a true umbrella into all manner of other services – including the big three, Justis, LexisNexis and Westlaw – these deep links have now been fixed by Westlaw and JustCite techies.

Further underpinning its umbrella claim, we come back to LexisNexis, with which JustCite has signed a groundbreaking new contract. It will see JustCite complete a comprehensive index of LexisNexis’s full legal collection.

Sixty additional titles will be added and all electronic LexisNexis legal content from hereon in will be indexed by JustCite. Comprising 33 case law report series and 27 journals, the complete list of new titles can be seen at www.justcite.com/newlnbtitles.

The significance of these developments should not be underestimated. In a world where the law is becoming as globalised as the economy, today’s lawyers need to look beyond their usual horizons more than ever before. Not having access to full-text material is one thing; not knowing that an unexpected case or article, that could undermine or enhance your argument, actually exists (and can be tracked down if need be) is another matter entirely.