2000

First published on infolaw, December 2000

infolaw welcomes the proposals by the Community Legal Service for the promotion of a common meta data standard for websites developed by organisations in the legal and advice sectors. Meta data (data about data) is a formal means of describing the content of documents – in this case web pages.

The CLS consultation document (at www.lcd.gov.uk/consult/meta/metafr.htm) does not define ‘Legal and Advice Sectors’. However, the proposals are part of a series of projects to enhance Just Ask! (at www.justask.org.uk), the website of the CLS whose terms of reference are to increase access to justice for ordinary people.

There are three elements to the proposed scheme:

• a meta data scheme, defining what elements will be used for classification
• a content classification scheme, defining a set of allowed terms for the ‘subject’ element
• a thesaurus matching terms which might be used by a typical user to the terms allowed by the content classification scheme

The meta data scheme proposed ‘conforms closely’ to the Dublin Core (DC) standard which defines 16 core elements: Title, Creator, Subject, Description, Publisher, Contributor, Date, Type, Format, Identifier, Source, Language, Relation, Coverage, Rights and References. The CLS proposes using the element Author instead of Creator. Elements may be qualified and DC sets out a number of recommended qualifiers (eg Date.Created). For the DC specification and usage manual see www.purl.org/DC/.

The content classification scheme (which, in accordance with DC, would be explicitly referenced in the meta data) will be commissioned from a suitably qualified legal information professional. The context of the scheme will be ‘members of the public in England and Wales who need to find relevant information across the whole of the Legal and Advice Sectors, which enables them to resolve or make progress towards the resolution of problems related to those sectors’.

Complementing the CLS content classification scheme will be a thesaurus that will help users to search for information who will not necessarily know the ‘official’ terms that have been used.

Nick Holmes of infolaw comments:

The adoption of Dublin Core should be taken as read, as it now has wide acceptance; but the CLS scheme should conform absolutely.

Regarding the content classification scheme, the CLS cannot be expected to work beyond its own terms of reference (and it is not clear whether it is seeking to do so). It is unlikely that it will come up with a one-size-fits-all scheme that will be wholly suitable for and acceptable to those servicing other users, ie the ‘haves’ seeking to buy and sell property and use other legal services, businesses seeking legal services and professionals seeking legal information. However, the acceptance of outside interests, while desirable, is not essential, since all that is required is that the meta data Subject element references a published standard.

Should the CLS scheme not meet their requirements the professions will be free to develop their own schemes. For example the Law Society of England and Wales uses a 52-subject, solicitor-oriented, work-type classification scheme which could be refined and formalised as a published standard.

[Added March 2001: See now Responses to Meta Data Proposals for Legal and Advice Sites]

Published in P.S., the journal of Probate Section, October 2000

The websites of relevant associations usually provide a good jumping off point for practitioners. However, for the probate practitioner, at present these sites disappoint: the Probate Section site at www.probatesection.org.uk currently has little in the way of content and no useful links (let’s hope this article prompts remedial action) and the Society for Trust and Estate Practioners site at www.step.org is subject to reconstruction, displaying only a smart logo in the meanwhile.

Undeterred, I trawled through the pages of the last (June 2000) issue of P.S. which prompted the following research – the results demonstrating the wide range of information available.

Primary law

On the front page of the journal was a piece about the Financial Services and Markets Bill and later in the issue articles on the Finance and Trustee Bills. All current Bills can be accessed on the Parliament site at www.parliament.the-stationery-office.co.uk/pa/pabills.htm. The Financial Services and Markets Act was enacted on 14 June 2000 – an impressive 433 sections and 22 schedules – and, along with other UK Acs since 1996 can be accessed on HMSO’s legislation site at www.legislation.hmso.gov.uk.

An increasingly useful site for UK and Irish primary law is the British and Irish Legal Information Institute (BAILII) at www.bailii.org which will shortly contain all publicly available primary law texts as well as the 1999 archives from Smith Bernal’s Casebase database of Court of Appeal judgments – all in one uniform searchable format.

Commentary and other resources

Intelligent use of a good internet search engine will always reward. I favour Google at www.google.com (for the reasons and tips on using search engines, see the first article in this series).

Using the full title of a Bill or Act in a web search will find many useful related documents and commentary. Always add the word UK to the search term to screen out irrelevant overseas sites and bear in mind that the less specific the title, the more spurious hits will result.

The names of parties to cases provide more or less unique search terms which will usually turn up many useful resources – likewise searching for the names of organisations.

Esterhuizen v. Allied Dunbar

The article on Probate Claims provided fertile ground. A Google search for Esterhuizen v. Allied Dunbar revealed the following:

• A note of the case in the Swarbrick and Co index (www.swarb.co.uk). The indexes on this site cover a huge body of law, providing brief details only, but sufficient to spur further research.
• An article on ‘The role, duties and obligations of executors and administrators’ by Kevin White on The Law Society of New South Wales site (www.lawsocnsw.asn.au).
• An article on ‘The risks run by in-house lawyers when dealing with a will or estate’ on the International Centre for Commercial Law site (www.icclaw.com). This prompted a visit to their Recent Law Developments page and thence to the site of 4 Paper Buildings who provide the Professional Negligence articles for ICCL (www.4paperbuildings.com).
• A note about the First Update to the 4th Edition of Drafting Trusts and Will Trusts. After much hacking at the URL in my browser’s location window (a technique worth perfecting), this turned out to be a submission to an online forum called Trusts and Wills accessible via the Chancery Bar Association site (www.chba.org.uk). It is a mirror of the list-served discussion moderated by James Kessler, barrister, author of the aforementioned work (www.kessler.co.uk).
• A brief piece on the subject in 5 New Square’s online newsletter (www.5newsquare.co.uk).

Enduring powers of attorney

The Enduring Powers of Attorney Act 1985 predates the publicly available statutory material on the web. However, a search for the words enduring powers of attorney brought up:

• Reference to the Enduring Powers of Attorney Act 1985 in the full text of the judgment in Re E (A donor) on the Court Service judgments site (www.courtservice.gov.uk/judgments/judg_home.htm)
• Reference to the EPA 1985 in the explanatory notes to Trustee Delegation Act 1999 on HMSO’s legislation site (www.hmso.gov.uk/acts/)

Bouette v. Rose

Again, a search on this unique name unearthed a few immediately useful resources:

• A headnote of the case on the Incorporated Council for Law Reporting’s Law Notes site (www.lawreports.co.uk).
• A digest of the case in Butterworths’ PI Online What’s New Archive for December 99 (www.butterworths.co.uk.
• The full text of the judgment on Mark Walton’s Mental Health Act and Mental Health Law site (www.markwalton.net).

Other sites

Other sites visited in my cover-to-cover journey through P.S. and worthy of bookmarking were:

• The Public Trust Office at www.publictrust.gov.uk.
• Title Research at www.titleresearch.co.uk.
• The Inland Revenue Capital Taxes Office at www.inlandrevenue.gov.uk/cto – free fillable IHT200 form as described in the article.
• The Law Society’s Office of Supervision of Solicitors at www.oss.lawsociety.org.uk.
• Many disgruntled complainants’ sites found by searching for references to the OSS.
• The Law Society’s Make A Will Website at www.make-a-will.org.uk.

Published in the Internet Newsletter for Lawyers, July 2000

A comparative review of the various CPR products and services by Nick Holmes

The introduction last year of a completely new code of procedure for the civil courts prompted the publication of a number of new practice manuals from the law publishers. Whereas previously Sweet & Maxwell’s Supreme Court Practice and Butterworths’ County Court Practice had been the twin standard works, now both have issued completely revised and republished civil practice works and Blackstone and Jordans have also aggressively entered the market. These publications are all now available in CD-Rom versions. The publication on the internet of the new Rules, PDs and Protocols by the Lord Chancellor’s Department and the Forms by the Court Service and the contemporaneous Crown Copyright concessions allowing such materials to be freely republished without permission also quickly spawned a number of added value electronic versions on the internet (Beagle and Roger Horne) and on CD (infolaw). The Lord Chancellor’s Department version of the Rules, available on the internet and in hardcopy since implementation, is now also available in a CD-Rom version from The Stationery Office (TSO).

This article compares the CD-Rom versions from the various publishers in some detail and also the web services available.

CD-Rom services

The table below compares the CD-Rom versions of these products, in the versions available at the end of May, according to objective criteria. Although decisions will still often be based on the utility of the hard copy manuals, it is felt that at present the CD-Rom versions offer the better comparison. While all the publishers offer some form of internet service, most are not yet full services and in some cases the services are tied to the CD-Rom subscription.

Installation and basic features

I started, as a typical user might, by simply removing the CD from its case and trying it, without reference to any documentation.

All products install from a Setup program on the CD, apart from the TSO version which runs automatically when the CD is inserted (or can be started from the Index file).

All products can be run from the CD (with only the control software installed) or installed to hard disk, though it is not clear how the TSO version should be installed to hard disk if that is what’s required.

Most of the publishers have chosen FolioViews as the publishing platform (ie the control software which displays the product and provides all the basic functions). Folio has been widely used by law (and other) publishers worldwide for many years, providing a sophisticated and rich environment for the development of electronic product. It provides as standard a dynamic contents list and reference (context) window; full or split screen viewing; full hypertext features; full text searching, either simple or with boolean operators; and other features.

Butterworths uses its own proprietary Books on Screen (BOS) interface. This has broadly similar features to Folio and will of course be familiar to those already using Butterworths CD product.

TSO has chosen to adopt web browser technology. A recent Java-enabled web browser is required – Internet Explorer 4.0 or above or Netscape 4.05 or above. The main difference here is that as web technology is page based, browsing and searching is not as precise as in Folio or BOS which are record based (generally a record is a paragraph, but in the White Book a numbered paragraph unit).

Although the software places various standard navigation and hypertext abilities at their disposal, the various publishers implement them to varying extents and often in distinctly different ways. It is beyond the scope of this review to cover the functionality of the products in any detail. The following example is, however, illustrative. Instances in the CPR of terms defined in the interpretation rule (rule 2.3) are not marked up in the Butterworths or TSO version; in the White Book there are hypertext (jump) links to a separate table of definitions which sets out the definitions from rule 2.3; in Jordans there are jump links to the appropriate paragraph in rule 2.3; in infolaw and Blackstone the appropriate paragraph of rule 2.3 pops up in-line in a window.

A final point on functionality is that some products enable the user to add their own annotations such as sticky notes, highlighters and bookmarks. These are maintained in a ‘shadow’ file and can thus be carried forward when updated versions are installed.

Structure and content

All but the infolaw CD are published also in hard copy versions and largely mirror those versions in terms of structure. With the larger works from Butterworths and Sweet & Maxwell it is probably worth first familiarising yourself with the layout of the print version as, without the comfort of headers and footers and a tangible physical location, it is easy to feel lost. The publishers’ section and paragraph numbering schemes which are essential for cross-reference purposes in the hard copy versions do also tend to intrude as there are enough paragraph numbering schemes employed in the various source materials.

The source materials are annotated with commentary on a rule-by-rule basis in the White and Green Books and Jordans; Blackstone presents the commentary as the body of the work with source materials in appendices.

The Rules and Practice Directions are presented in separate sections in some products, with the PDs following the Parts to which they relate in others. There would seem to be no significant advantage of one approach over the other in the CD version.

All products include the Personal Injury and Clinical Negligence pre-action protocols. The White Book also includes the draft Road Traffic Claims protocol.

A number of the products include the specialist court guides for the Commercial Court, Chancery and Mercantile Courts. The Patents Court Guide is also included in the infolaw and Blackstone products.

Three of the publishers include the official set of forms published by the Court Service in their products. These fillable forms presented in Adobe Acrobat’s PDF format (portable document format). To view, fill in and print these, the Acrobat Reader is required, which can be installed from the CD if needed. Butterworths employ their own form display and viewing software. The Butterworths forms are all scanned images and consequently of relatively inferior quality. Butterworths and Blackstones also include as text many practice forms which may be cut and pasted to your word processor. Sweet & Maxwell present the fixed forms as fillable Microsoft Word forms. They have by far the largest library of forms, including around 150 practice forms, though the latter are low quality scanned images. TSO have incorporated HotDocs versions of the forms. The most common forms are automated (may be filled in via a question and answer session). The forms can either be accessed from within the product as needed or installed for separate use.

The fees orders are included in all but the TSO version and other legislation is included in most products. The Green and White Books also contain substantial sections covering specialist jurisdictions, etc, and the Green and White Books and Jordans include court directories.

The deciding factor for many prospective purchasers may well be the amount and utility of the authored commentary provided by the eminent panels of editors. The White and Green Books and Jordans provide annotations and notes on a rule-by-rule basis and procedural tables. In Jordans notes are coloured blue to distinguish them clearly from the source text. Blackstone takes a different approach with the substantial commentary presented as the main text of the work. infolaw and TSO do not provide commentary.

Judging by the extent of the text and list of contents of the works (and the weight of the print versions!), it can be said that the White Book is the most substantial, followed by the Green Book, Blackstone and Jordans in that order.

Pricing and service

The table summarises the updating service and pricing of each product. In some cases the CD version cannot be purchased without the book. There are different scales for network licensing – a 5 user licence is chosen for comparison purposes at that level only.

Web update services for CD subscribers

Butterworths provide a forms updating service only.

Sweet & Maxwell and Jordans both provide up-to-date versions of the Rules and PDs plus other update information on web update pages available to CD-Rom subscribers. Sweet & Maxwell is due to launch a full online Civil Procedure service soon, though no details are presently available.

Blackstone do not provide a web update facility.

infolaw provides free access to its Civil Procedure update page which links to all new and in prospect amendments to the Rules, PDs and Protocols.

TSO do not themselves provide a web service connected with their CD-Rom. However, the Lord Chancellor’s Department (authors of the TSO version) provide free access to a complete and up-to-date version of the Rules, PDs and Pre-Action Protocols on their website in effectively the same format as that published on the TSO CD-Rom and an up-to-date set of Civil Court forms in Adobe PDF format is maintained on the Court Service website. See further Web services – Official services below.

Web services

There is a wealth of CPR materials on the web, both primary sources and commentary, and much of it is available for free access.

While all the commercial publishers offer some form of internet service, most are not yet full services and in some cases the services are tied to a CD-Rom subscription (see above).

Official services

The only official version of the CPR, it is said, is HMSO’s printed version of the Civil Procedure Rules 1998 and subsequent amending SIs. HMSO publish these on the web for free access at www.hmso.gov.uk/legis.htm. However, as the texts are in unconsolidated form, they are of limited use.

The Lord Chancellor’s Department broke new ground in publishing the CPR, PDs and Protocols on the web as they were made, and provides a substantial service in maintaining these in an up-to-date form (often ahead of the published SI) and also providing links to discussion papers, drafts and other related documents at www.lcd.gov.uk/civil/procrules_fin/cprocfr.htm. The court forms are published and maintained by the Court Service in Adobe Acrobat PDF format at www.courtservice.gov.uk/fandl/forms_home.htm.

Other free versions

Two other free access web versions of the Rules deserve mention: Roger Horne’s Yet Another Woolf Site at opal.he.net/~hrothgar/YAWS/index/text.htm and the Beagle site at www.beagle.org.uk/cpr/. Both these sites provide up-to-date value-added versions of the Rules, PDs, Protocols and other materials, including details of decided cases.

Butterworths

Butterworths’ Civil Procedure Online is described as is the complete online reference source on the latest civil court practice and procedure, including access to the full text of the Green Book (see CD-Rom section above for contents) and supporting materials. These include News, Comment, Legislation, Cases, Forms, Precedents and Links. The core materials are presented using Butterworths standard NetBOS ineterface. A subscription to Civil Procedure Online costs £350 p.a. single user, £650 p.a. for a 5-user network licence.

Lawtel

Lawtel’s Civil Procedure Interactive at www.lawtel.co.uk is currently included in the Lawtel subscription and includes a fully searchable database of the Rules, PDs and Protocols, with practical commentary from Simmons & Simmons, plus court guides, reference tables and a glossary of new terms. All commentary is linked to cited Rules, case law and legislation. The service is updated every 24 hours.

Lawtel is also producing an online version of Blackstone’s Civil Practice 2000, which will sit as a separate product within this specialist centre.

An annual subscription to Lawtel costs £720 (sole practitioner), £2,000 (5 partner firm). Blackstone’s Civil Practice will incur a supplementary charge.

Commentary sites

Many sites provide useful free commentary on the CPR, including the following:

• Simmons & Simmons: The Woolf Reforms at www.simmons-simmons.com/dispute/woolf/index.html – provides a succinct commentary.
• 2 Temple Gardens: Woolf Commentary at www.2templegardens.co.uk/woolf/1index.htm – another good commentary site.
• The Civil Justice Council at www.open.gov.uk/civjustice/ – established under the Civil Procedure Act 1997, the Council’s remit is to: keep the civil justice system under review; consider how to make the civil justice system more accessible, fair and efficient; and advise the Lord Chancellor and the judiciary.
• Laurie West-Knights’ LawOnLine at www.LawOnLine.cc – provides a wealth of commentary on the effect and application of the CPR; updated frequently; registration required.
• Watmores: The Woolf Reforms at www.watmores.co.uk/woolf.htm – provides guidance for insurers on the Woolf reforms.

CPR CD-Rom services

Published in P.S., the journal of Probate Section, June 2000
Part of this article originally appeared in the Solicitors Journal, February 2000

Most organisations of any size now have websites. Indeed it is frequently the case that an organisation’s web address is the most prominent (and sometimes the only) form of address appearing in its advertisements. There are also many millions of individuals and very small organisations who also have websites. Collectively these sites provide a huge and valuable resource for information and exchange. But the sheer size of this resource requires

Which websites are the most useful to the lawyer? What do they offer? and How can they be found? This article answers these questions in overview, with some detailed help on using search engines. Subsequent articles will look in more detail at using the web to assist probate practice in particular.

If you have a particular comment, query or problem relating to probate practice on the web, please email it to NickHolmes@infolaw.co.uk and I will take account of it in subsequent articles.

The ‘legal web’

The sites that will be most immediately useful to the UK lawyer I refer to as the ‘UK legal web’. These include:

• Government, the parliaments and the courts. Official sites provide free access to primary legal materials, other official documents and guidance, rules, forms and a variety of other information to assist your practice.
• Lawyers. Your associates and competitors’ sites are naturally generally aimed at attracting and retaining clients. However, on many sites there is much useful material which can assist the small practitioner with otherwise limited information resources, including commentary on legal developments, briefings, newsletters, articles, checklists and precedents. They will also, of course, be useful as a reference point in developing your own web services.
• Law associations. The websites of the Law Society and the many specialist associations provide much useful information directly relevant to your practice.
• Law schools. Many law schools have been long-established on the web and their websites provide a wealth of materials.
• Commercial law publishers, both the more established and the newer breed of information providers, provide a variety of free materials. The higher value information services are generally charged on annual subscription and have yet to make much impact except at the top end of the market.
• There are many other non-profit organisations relevant to your practice publishing a wide range of information.
• Don’t forget many of your suppliers are online. Books, office supplies, law stationery, legal staff – all are available now over the web.

Gateways to the legal web

How does one gain access to all these useful sites without wasting hours of fruitless endeavour? One needs an effective jumping off point, or – in current parlance – a ‘portal’.

A portal (or gateway), as the word implies, is a site designed to facilitate access to the web. Portals are flavour of the month these days, as a successful site can attract a high volume of traffic which will in turn attract advertising revenue and other commercial opportunities. There are many pretenders to the UK legal portal throne, with as many different approaches. Given the democratic nature of the web, it is unlikely that any one will establish dominance. I can do no better than recommend you first visit the infolaw gateway at www.infolaw.co.uk which I maintain [picture: infolaw.bmp]. This provides a classified index of the UK legal web, including browsable listings of lawyers, government and legal resources by topic, selected for relevance and quality, plus classified listings of suppliers, topical articles on developments in the UK legal web (including this article) and other features. Included also is a listing of other legal gateways.

Finding things on the web

The web consists of probably more than a billion pages of information and an elite handful of services, including such names as Alta Vista, Excite, Infoseek, Lycos, Yahoo and Google have established themselves as robust and efficient solutions to searching the whole of the web (though none indexes every page).

The vast majority of web users simply type a few words into a search box and see what happens. It seems sensible therefore to concentrate on two key factors determining the relevance of your search results: choosing the ‘right’ search engine and choosing search terms carefully.

Choosing a search engine

Most search engines will return results for pages that contain any of your search terms, ranking results by weighting some or all of the following:

• the number of search terms matched
• the frequency of occurrence of the terms
• the part of the page in which the terms are found (ie title, body text, keywords etc)
• the proximity of the terms
• the order in which you entered the terms

Though these search engines will return millions of hits, the most relevant sites will generally be contained on the first half-dozen pages. Even so, there will be a number of results on those first pages which (for one reason or another) are not relevant and many relevant results which are buried much deeper down the list and likely never to be seen. Also the ranking applied may at best seem haphazard.

Google

Google (www.google.com), a relatively new search engine, uses an entirely different approach and in my view stands head and shoulders above the rest.

Google returns results for pages that contain all your search terms, ranking pages according to their popularity (according to how many other pages link to them) and according to the proximity of your search terms. Google also exerpts the text that matches your query.

Google’s page ranking method deserves further explanation. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote by page A for page B. Google assesses a page’s importance by the votes it receives and also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves important weigh more heavily and help to make other pages important.

Google’s page ranking system is therefore a general indicator of importance and does not depend on a specific query. Rather, it is a characteristic of a page itself based on data from the web that Google analyzes. It precludes human interference – so no one can ‘purchase’ a higher rank or commercially alter results.

Choosing your search terms

It is of course very difficult to generalise about the use of search terms, but it is worth bearing in mind always that a web search engine has indexed the whole of the web and you should therefore be aiming as much to screen out or demote the irrelevant or low value sites as to find the relevant.

A few pointers therefore for selecting terms for ‘legal’ searches:

• Use terms that lawyers rather than laymen would use. This will screen out for example many ‘law for the layman’ sites.
• As an extension of the above, use titles to Acts, SIs etc which are bound to be referred to. This will screen out or demote for example low value information pages on law firm ‘brochure’ sites.
• If you are researching local law, include UK or England or Scotland as appropriate as a search word. This will demote sites concerned with overseas jurisdictions, including of course US sites, but also Australian and Commonwealth sites whose terminology is more similar.

More about search engines

A wealth of information about search engines is on the SearchengineWatch site at www.searchenginewatch.com.