Case study: Digitising case law and opening up the justice system
'A vital step towards greater openness and transparency'
The National Archives created a brand new digital service, as it worked to bring court document accessibility into the 21st century.
Court judgments and tribunal decisions are important public records. They provide a complete picture of what happened in individual cases with the decision the court made, and collectively show how law has developed over time.
The judgments themselves are a source of law, acting as an authority on what the law is based around to hold great evidential value.
Disrupting the information flow of one of our oldest institutions doesn't happen often, especially in a jurisdiction like England and Wales. But opening up the justice system and making court judgments easily accessible to anyone who needs or wants them is a vital step towards greater openness and transparency - as is ensuring the long-term preservation of these records.
As the official archive and publisher for the UK Government, The National Archives is world leading in storing and publishing information securely.
Working with the Ministry of Justice, HM Courts and Tribunals Service and the Judicial Office, The National Archives decided to do what it knew would be difficult and create a new digital service - Find Case Law.
Opening up case law
While legal professionals have a depth of knowledge when it comes to accessing and using judgments and tribunal decisions, other users without a legal background are less familiar with the process.
The goal of Find Case Law was to lower the barrier to accessing court materials, making it as simple as possible for not only lawyers and judges, but professionals, academics, journalists and members of the public to review individual judgments and for the first time to compute over case law as a dataset.
By digitising case law and generating more data, the increased access to datasets means they be reused over time for multiple purposes.
Through our discovery and alpha phase, we set about identifying the different users of the service and their needs.
They ranged from professionals who check case law as part of their day job, to those in the third sector and others who find themselves advising people that encounter the justice system.
Partnering with digital agency dxw, we formed a multidisciplinary team to create the new site that would upload, store and publish court judgments and tribunal decisions.
Working together, we shared our technical and domain expertise and set about creating the service in the cloud, connecting the database and the frontend, and making sure the fundamentals of the searching and browsing of judgments provided an accessible and seamless user experience.
With the Service Standard and shared agile working practices and expectations underpinning our approach, we were able to bring together a blended team that delivered the project in just three months.
Accessible, anywhere on any device
Previous case law publishing methods have focused on the needs of users working within the legal profession, but the Find Case Law project takes a different approach.
Removing barriers for users like paywalls, the service provides a straightforward way to record and find judgments, making them accessible to anyone on any device, from members of the public to legal professionals and publishers.
At the back-end, we have connected the service to an existing secure way for clerks and judges to transfer judgments to the archive, so we can make them quickly available for publication and re-use.
Judgments can be viewed online in HTML format and downloaded as PDF, but we've also made them available in XML format. This means the data is machine-readable and facilitates further processing and analysis using data analytics and machine learning.
The investment in modernising the storing and publication process has put in place the infrastructure needed to build a complete public record, which is vital for research. Through appropriate use, and published under a clear re-use license, it presents an opportunity to gather new insights into how our justice system is operating and how our law is evolving, at the same time protecting the proper administration of justice.
An important step forward for open justice
It's a breakthrough digital service, not just in terms of transparency, re-use, and improved public access but also the long-term digital preservation of primary sources of law. Now court and tribunal decisions from The Supreme Court, Court of Appeal, High Court, and Upper Tribunals are available online.
There are more developments in the pipeline, and over the coming months and years, we will work to expand the breadth of what is published and made accessible to the public, including judgments from the lower courts and tribunals.
Find Case Law marks an important step in open justice and demonstrates the importance of creating a sustainable infrastructure for digital record keeping in the UK.
John Sheridan and Nicki Welch are Digital Director and Service Owner - Access to Digital Records, respectively, at the National Archives.