Jersey Legal Information Board Newsletter: Autumn/Winter 2011
Introduction
It’s almost a year since I sent out the last newsletter, since which time we have made substantial changes to the way in which www.jerseylaw.je is accessed, at the same time continuing to maintain and upgrade our service for registered users. What follows is a brief summary of JLIB's work during the past year. We are always pleased to have feedback and aim to incorporate as many of your suggestions as we can to improve our service to you, the users. The User group has been instrumental in bringing about cosmetic changes designed to make the website more useful to you and which will be implemented in the next release, so if you feel you could contribute to the future development of the website, please consider becoming a member of the group.
Value added services for Registered Users
· Jersey Law Reports (JLR) and Unreported Judgments (UJ)
In July the long-promised switch took place when UJs became freely available on www.jerseylaw.je without subscription. At the same time the value-added JLRs were made available for registered users only. This project took many months to implement not because the programming was difficult, but because it was necessary to ensure that sensitive judgments were not put on open view, and reserved in a Restricted folder for only those users entitled to access them, (mainly the legal profession). Identifying those judgments was a painstaking and time-consuming task but now 1998 to the present day have been placed in appropriate folders. Pre-1998 UJs are scanned documents and therefore as we were unable to redact them inexpensively they have all been placed in the Restricted folder and will be unavailable to the public. We have judgments going back to the late 1970s and are uploading them in reverse order. We are back to 1996 at present.
· Jersey Judgments
Work is ongoing to convert and upload the Jersey Judgments series (JJ), which predates the Jersey Law Reports. The website holds JJs back to 1972 currently. Updates will always appear on the ‘What’s New’ page and subscribers to the daily update email will be notified within 24 hours.
· Pay online
Users of the website who are not registered but who have previously enjoyed access to the JLRs free will now be offered the opportunity to purchase a JLR or a note online, or to take out a temporary subscription of 1, 3,or 6 months.
Free Access to Law Movement
Jersey’s unreported judgment citations (except those in the Restricted folder) have been made freely available to a wider audience via www.worldlii.org and www.commonlii.org. In a project many months in the planning, citations started to appear at the end of September, and very soon will be followed by the JLRs, JJs, and the Jersey & Guernsey Law Review. We hope that legislation will also become available to WorldLII and CommonLII in the future. Using citations will enable us to drive traffic back to our website to read the full texts. The move comes as a result of JLIB joining the Free Access to Law movement (FALM) (see the WorldLII website http://www.worldlii.org/worldlii/declaration/montreal_en.html for more details). Discussions are underway to create a EuroLII, with European jurisdictions both inside and outside the European Union contributing laws and judgments.
Later this year we will, at no cost to JLIB, put Jersey’s judgment citations on the JustCite citator, which is part of Justis Publishing Group. Allowing citations to be published in JustCite will increase Jersey’s presence internationally and drive website traffic to jerseylaw.je from diverse jurisdictions, especially in the fields where Jersey has built a reputation in case law.
Legal Library
Having put over 60 volumes online we are monitoring usage of the legal books in our online library and are in the process of discussing with publishers the possibility of putting extracts of new legal books online.
Annotated Laws
The Annotations project is progressing well and has been singled out for praise by members of the profession as a feature that adds value by saving search time. For anyone who hasn’t yet made use of the Annotated Laws, reported cases are annotated against the individual articles of Laws with hyperlinks to the Jersey Law Reports and Jersey Judgments. This also includes a hyperlink direct to the specific reference within the judgment as a whole. Annotated Laws are revised currently to the end of March 2011 and recent additions are Chapters
12. Family and Personal; and 20 Medical and Health
Home Page Redesign
The redesigned Home Page and What’s New page went live earlier this year with a cleaner look and feel, more capacity to hold items for longer than previously and space for the social media icons which have become familiar on most websites. Feedback from users was, in the main positive, but some cosmetic changes were requested and they are in the next version of the software to be released before the end of the year.
Developing Citizens pages
A Focus Group last year looked at how best to provide legal advice and guidance for citizens and community and after some research into use of both websites, it was apparent that far more people went to the Citizens Advice Bureau (CAB) website for advice than accessed JLIB (ratio of 30:1), so the recommendation was made that the public would be best served by JLIB supporting the work of CAB. JLIB has now partnered CAB and provided funding to enable CAB to update its website and restructure the information contained within it. Early in the new year, the CAB manager and I went to talk to law firms to ascertain if any were willing to support CAB by updating guidance notes, and 4 firms volunteered. They will be getting online access to CAB's website shortly. JLIB will continue to provide up-to-date legal advice and guidance notes on court matters for CAB. Members of the public looking for legal advice on www.jersey.je will be redirected to Jersey CAB.
Social Networking
We are maintaining our Twitter link to the website, http://twitter.com/Jerseylegalinfo . Subscribers are provided with up-to-date information about new items on www.jerseylaw.je . It’s quicker than the email service if you are waiting for a judgment to be published. Using Linkedin to provide groups and a discussion forum has proved more complicated than expected, so we will revisit that feature after we implement the software upgrade.
Advertise your events on www.jerseylaw.je
We are steadily increasing the number of events being advertised for the legal community. If you have a course, conference or other event that you think would benefit from being more widely advertised - we have nearly 3,000 hits per week on our site - please contact jlibwebmaster@gov.je
User Group
We would like to hear from any users who would be prepared to be part of a user group for the website which will meet with JLIB and our system developers, TCB, at intervals during the year to influence development, share ideas, information and concerns of fellow users. Please contact s.dufeu@gov.je if you would like to be in the user group.
User Testing
It is crucial for a public facing website such as Jerseylaw to be thoroughly tested before it’s released. We do the basic testing in-house, but after that we rely on users to assist us to comment on the ‘look and feel’ of the changes and to implement a bug-free product from day one. We would be very pleased to hear from any users who would be prepared to test the new version of the software. It will take approximately half an hour and the browsers we need to test are IE 8, 7, 6 and 9; Firefox 6 or 7; Safari 5; Chrome 14 and the ipad. If you are using any of these browsers - from work, home or while travelling, and you can offer to spend some time on user testing (where else do you get the chance to break the system?), please contact the jlibwebmaster@gov.je stating which browser you will use. You will receive in return the test script to follow.
On behalf of the Board and staff of the Jersey Legal Information Board may I take this opportunity to wish all users of www.jerseylaw.je an early Seasons Greetings and a very Happy New Year. We look forward to providing another year of the highest standard of service to the legal profession and the community.
I would be grateful if you would pass this letter on to your partners and/or fee earners as we would be delighted to receive any feedback from them on any aspect of the website. Please send any comments to s.dufeu@gov.je.
Sue du Feu
Programme Director
Jersey Legal Information Board