If this improves access to judgements - free of charge to the reader at the point of delivery, then it is to be welcomed. Baillie is good. If this gives access to more judgements and easy searchability, it will be immensely useful. Coupled with the governments legislation data base this should put a vast library of information at out fingertips.
'Judgments are held not as documents but as live data, meaning that details such as parties' names can be redacted when required. '
Ah yes, making good use of the internet's legendary inability to retain details previously published on it. Now if you'll excuse me I'm off to check deleted tweets of MPs to see if there's anything juicy.
In the one minute I spent on that site:
1. For Tribunals, why can you only search for Upper Tier? Bailli's case law search was a lot more exhaustive than this one. Bailli really let you narrow your focus for one area of law/different chambers of the tribunal in the tribunal searches. Now I'm sifting through so many false flags. They did test this website called "Find Case Law" by actually trying to you know Find Case Law or at least let a solicitor try and use it?
2. What is this export as XML format? Its just gobbledygook to me. My work pc only has your bog standard microsoft word/office 365.
3. Why can't we export as a DOC or DOCX. Its now utterly useless to copy quotes from cases to representations or skeleton arguments
4. I don't see why the top search option is to search by a Judge's name. Are we into Celebrity Culture now?
5. Its not teething problems. There is simply a lack of functionality built in to this website. It is as if certain narrower fields are being diluted/hidden away from ease of access.
To all those complaining, it's teething troubles. Does everyone expect everything to be perfect on the day of launch? No doubt NA will welcome feedback once practitioners have been able to use it for a while.
It seems to me that in the legal profession the default position is that we don't like change. I liken it to each time we get a new mobile phone; it's "never as good as the old one". Repeat ad infinitum.
Clicking on the link for “Senior Court Costs Office” below the heading of “Find judgments by court”, for example, does not, as one might expect, take the user to a library / list of SCCO cases. Rather, it appears to show (183) search results for the keyword “costs” in seemingly no particular order and not all of the results are SCCO judgments. Baby steps…
I tapped in the reported cases I have been involved in...and yes I found them but then knew what I was looking for.
Joe Public, having no method of searching, will be slightly at a loss if he does not have knowledge that would fit into of the limited search criteria - name of a party or date range etc.
Does this mean Balilli will no longer be updated?
@Anonymous: Commented on: 19 April 2022 10:06am:
The law is made to be known by anyone, not by a few high priests.
It's time to: 1) get rid of the stare decisis madness; 2) get laws codified, accessible and clear; 3) train more judges, rather than machines.
The Stare Decisis method has its benefits. In fact Woolf when he ushered in the CPR was said to have encouraged limited reliance on the strict 'pleadings' - and that didn't work as he recommended that a letter be sufficient 'pleading' thus encouraging Pre Action Protocol.
The more interesting report to read at this time would be the Middleton Report on bringing judicial decision making / accessibility of the Law to the masses.
Never a good idea really.
All that is needed is for the government to look at an existing off-the-shelf, adaptable system with minimum design input needed. What am I talking about? Wikis. There is a cheap model available from MediaWiki (associated with the more famous Wikipedia). Laugh all you want at the weird corners of Wikipedia but the basic methodology is sound. They have an offshoot called Wikidata, which is an excellent database product with a simple layout, easy search facility, and a very simple system for creating new pages.
What you are sniggering about is probably the ability of bored teenagers (and childish adults) to add rude words to Wikipedia articles, but that is because they allow anonymous editing by literally anyone. They could quite easily switch Wikipedia to allow edits only by registered, identifiable people and the rude words would disappear in an instant. Wikis have an in-built user account system. All the government would have to do is give writing access only to court users. Obviously reading access to most pages would be public.
Step back and look at it dispassionately. Wikipedia is already a proven idea (leave assess the graffiti). It would quickly bring part of the justice system kicking and screaming into the present rather than the 19th century.
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