Internet Newsletter for lawyers has published the following piece. Here is the introduction.
Find Case Law is a new public service providing access to court judgments and tribunal decisions. It was launched in April 2022 and has been funded and developed by The National Archives, working with the Ministry of Justice, HMCTS and the Judicial Office.
We set out with three goals for the Find Case Law service:
- to provide free public access to judgments, through a modern and accessible digital service that meets user’s needs;
- to preserve judgments permanently as digital public records in the archive;
- to provide judgments as data for re-use by third parties, enabling innovation whilst protecting the proper administration of justice with licensing controls.
The National Archives and our predecessors in the Public Records Office have a long track record of keeping important legal records. Given the Ministry of Justice’s goal of improving court transparency, and our experience operating legislation.gov.uk, it made sense for us to take on the task of archiving and publishing court judgments for the nation. From a record keeping perspective, the judgment is the most important record of the court – setting out the facts of the case, the court’s decision and the reasons for the decision. We are now sent judgments by the senior courts, as soon as they are handed down and released for publication. We then archive and publish them.
Of course, we are not the first people to provide free public access to court judgments on the web. We are standing on the shoulders of giants. The charity, BAILII, has blazed a trail for over twenty years as part of the free access to law movement, and continues to do so. Making sure BAILII, ICLR, the commercial legal publishers and others can all obtain the judgments they need, is an important part of our service offer.
Developing legal information services takes years of work. The Find Case Law service was launched as an Alpha. It is in the early stages of its development and we are making improvements all the time. So far, we have made 22 releases since launch – roughly one release a week. There is still a long way to go for the service to reach maturity.
Coverage
One of the main issues is the limited coverage of judgments and decisions held by the Find Case Law service. There are just over 52,000 judgments and decisions on the service, dating from 2003 to present. Most of these were supplied to us by BAILII and we are very grateful for their support.
Widening coverage will take time and sustained effort to address. To date, we have bought digital copies of other judgments and decisions. We are currently working through these judgments and decisions to get them ready for publication and expand our collection.
Initially only judgments and decisions with neutral citations will be available. We are working to assign identifiers to judgments and decisions without neutral citations.
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