ICLR Online Launches

The Incorporated Council of Law Reporting is a creature of the legal profession itself. The logo that appears at the head of this blog post attests to our official status and standing. The Royal coat of arms is surrounded by those of the four Inns of Court and the now defunct Serjeants’ Inn. Accordingly, it was fitting that the launch of ICLR’s new service, ICLR Online, took place in the majestic setting of Middle Temple’s Great Hall on 18 October 2011.

The launch of ICLR Online sees the Council enter an exciting new phase in its 146-year history. The launch night was an opportunity for members of the Bar, the judiciary, solicitors, academics and law librarians to assemble together and share in the unveiling of the most significant development in the Council’s history since the launch of The Weekly Law Reports in 1953. By all accounts, the evening was a roaring success!

The ICLR's cartoon by Alex Williams looked wonderful on a easel

Guests were treated to the sounds of Jazz for Parties, a soulful four-piece featuring one of ICLR’s law reporters, Elanor Dymott, and a personalised cartoon sketch by Alex Williams (of Queen’s Counsel fame). And of course, no social event at the Inns of Court would be complete without a generous helping of drinks and canapés.

The purpose of the evening was to give our guests the chance to see ICLR Online in action, to engage with it and learn why we believe the new service represents an important advancement in the way practitioners, academics and students research the law. Live demonstrations ran throughout the evening, in addition to a large projected visualisation of our product demo at the top of the hall.

Judge Chambers QC opened the speeches at the event

ICLR were incredibly fortunate to launch the new service with the support of the Lord Chief Justice, the Master of the Rolls and our own chairman, His Honour Judge Chambers QC. The Lord Chief Justice delivered a characteristically erudite, charming and amusing speech about why the work of ICLR is so critical to the proper functioning of the courts and how the launch of ICLR Online will further the administration of justice. It wouldn’t be right to attempt to reproduce the speech in this blog post, but there is one point raised by his Lordship that is worthy of additional emphasis.

It remains the case that too much rather than too little law is reported. The incompetent advocate, said his Lordship, is the one who confuses weight with authority. The competent advocate, on the other hand, is the one who directs the court only to those cases that really matter. Sometimes less is more. Selectivity in reportage has been ICLR’s guiding principle since its establishment in the mid-Victorian era and remains so to this day.

Paul Magrath demonstrating the unique features of ICLR Online, including Citator Plus

Rebecca Herlé with The Lord Chief Justice, Judge Chambers QC and other gurests at the event

The development of ICLR Online has been both a rewarding and painstaking process. Our objective has been to create a fair and moderately priced service that combines the solid, dependable virtues of our printed law reports with an easy to use online platform. The launch party represents the fulfilment of that objective. With our new service users will enjoy instant access to over 77,000 of the cases that matter.

146 years on, ICLR remains the master of its art: the provision of the most accurate reports of those cases that change the law with absolute clarity of expression. The launch of ICLR Online on the evening of 18 October 2011 ushered in a new chapter for the Council and there is much, much more to come…

Now available to try and buy: ICLR Online

The Incorporated Council of Law Reporting (ICLR) was established in 1865 in order to provide the best reports of the most important cases, at a modest price and in the most convenient format. Those aims have now been triumphantly achieved in today's demanding market with a feature-packed online service, ICLR Online, now available to subscribers.

The solid, dependable virtues of The Law Reports and The Weekly Law Reports are now available, together with our other series of law reports, in a direct and easy to use platform.

In developing this platform, we have been guided by research into users' requirements, as well as our own experience of what works best. Designed by practitioners for practitioners, ICLR Online provides:

• Simple case searching that gives fast, accurate results
• Clear list of relevant results showing keywords and references
• Reports that enable quick and easy navigation to relevant passages or to other cases
  
• Integrated PDF reader providing court-ready copy without navigating away from current page

Two key features differentiate ICLR Online from any rival service:

CitatorPlus, our powerful index tool, provides an "index card" listing information relevant to each case, displayed alongside the report itself, instantly putting your research into context and showing the history, effect and current status of each reported case. More than just a citator, CitatorPlus provides a searchable resource containing the most authoritative index information for each case, including not only those reported by ICLR but also other leading series such as All ER, Lloyd's, LGR, RTR and Tax Cases.

Our unique Briefcase function makes your research portable. You can store and retrieve cases and index cards for future reference, in user-defined bundles. Such cases can then be saved or printed out for court use, coursework or seminar materials.

As publishers of The Law Reports, the official series, the ICLR is also the judicially preferred source of any case required to be cited in court. Our other series include:

• The Weekly Law Reports, providing the widest and most up to date general coverage of new cases.
• The Industrial Cases Reports, for cases on employment, discrimination and pensions law.
• The Business Law Reports, for cases on company, commercial and intellectual property law.
• The Public and Third Sector Law Reports, for cases on charity, social enterprise and public service law.
• The WLR Daily, our free case summary service, providing an update on the most recent cases across all those areas.

The ICLR Online service was launched at a packed event held in Middle Temple on 18 October, with speeches by Lord Judge, the Lord Chief Justice, Lord Neuberger of Abbotsbury, Master of the Rolls, and His Honour Judge Nicholas Chambers QC, Chairman of the Incorporated Council of Law Reporting for England and Wales. A full report will shortly be appearing on this blog. In the meantime, you can see the photos on our Facebook page.

To learn more about ICLR Online, view our demo.

To request a trial, click here.

BabyBarista - Dress Down Friday

It pays to do your research properly, as The Creep found out in this week’s edition of the BabyBarista, featuring the ICLR.

Be sure not to make the same mistakes in court; take advantage of our free ICLR Online trial where you can download court ready PDF's. Apply for your free trial today on the ICLR website.

The above image is courtesy of the BabyBarista blog (illustrated by Alex Williams)

The Rolls Building -- now open for business

Roll up, roll up! Company, commercial, technology and construction. They've got 'em all in London's brand new court complex, which last week opened its doors for, er, business.

Located in Fetter Lane, in the heart of legal London, the Rolls Building brings together in one place all the courts of the Chancery Division of the High Court (including those dealing with companies, trusts and intellectual property) with those of the Admiralty, Commercial and Technology & Construction subdivisions of the Queen's Bench Division. In other words, all the courts that deal in one form or another with businesses and their advisers. As such, it marks the fulfillment of a project which has been in the offing for some years now -- for at least as long as we've been publishing the Business Law Reports. Speaking as the editor of that series, and on behalf of all its reporters, I can only marvel at the convenience of finding in one place all the first instance decisions which we are likely to want to report -- as well as some of the appeals, since the Chancellor, Sir Andrew Morritt, will also be holding Court of Appeal sittings in the building.

This is a modern high-tech court complex, designed to meet the needs of lawyers and litigants of the future. It even looks like an office building, with a light and airy atrium in place of the somewhat gloomy atmosphere of the main Royal Courts of Justice building (whose Victorian gothic style sometimes feels like a cross between Ghormenghast and Disneyland). The Rolls Building has clean, simple lines, lots of clear glass and, hopefully, a similarly transparent approach to the administration of justice.

Nor, we are pleased to note, have the needs of the law reporters working for ICLR been overlooked. Each court includes a space for the official law reporter, enabling him or her to attend hearings and record, where appropriate, the legal submissions which will be summarised if and when a case is reported in The Law Reports. The value of this is all the greater when one notices how efficiently the space in these compact modern courts has been managed.

There is a larger court permanently available for company law applications, and three "super courts" designed for larger disputes involving more lawyers, more money and, inevitably, more press interest. Last week one of them, Court 26, was busy with a trial hearing before Mrs Justice Gloster in the long-running Abramovich v Berezovksy litigation, which has excited a lot of press comment, either because of the celebrity of the Russian oligarchs going head to head, or perhaps because it may be the last chance to see Jonathan Sumption QC in action as a barrister before he finally takes up his post as a Justice of the Supreme Court. Sumption, who is also a brilliant historian specialising in the Hundred Years War (no ironic comparisons with this case, please) is appearing for the defendant, Roman Abramovich. To cope with the additional press presence, two consultation rooms in the building had been given over to "Livenote", a simultaneous relay consisting of a large screen displaying a line by line transcript of proceedings together with a live audio link, to enable journalists to follow the unfolding drama even if they couldn't get into the court itself.

London is already a major international centre for marine and commercial arbitration, and the Rolls Building is part of a new strategy by the Justice Secretary, Kenneth Clarke, to make the City of London attractive not just as a financial centre but also as a centre for litigation. In a speech given last month at the CityUK Future Litigation event hosted by solicitors' firm Clifford Chance, he rather sportingly declared: "I am almost as much of an enthusiast for English law as I am for English cricket." But, he added, while the UK's system of civil and criminal justice had many strengths, it was also "somewhat old-fashioned and bureaucratic, and doesn't always work well for the public, or for business."

Naturally enough, much of the attention has centred on the Alternative Business Structures, brought it by the Legal Services Act 2007 which will enable lawyers to form partnerships with non-legal professionals and accept outside investment, something the President of the Law Society, John Wotton, has said will "provide a means for widening access to legal services" (Solicitors Journal, 9 August 2011). It will enable companies like the Co-operative Group, already involved in banking and insurance, to offer certain kinds of legal services in competition with high street firms; but it will also enable big city firms to expand their operations and extend their reach into new markets, as the Justice Secretary hopes:

"The rule of law is one of our greatest exports. This reflects, in part, our national genius for legal services, which generated nearly 2% of UK GDP in 2009 -- a rather healthy £23bn... Our competitive advantage reflects many things: our open market, the unrivalled quality of the UK legal profession, our record of judicial independence and the plain good sense of English common law, amongst others. People turn to us because they understand that a decision from a UK court carries a global guarantee of impartiality, integrity and enforceability. Despite a very strong record, I believe we could do still more, particularly in the face of increasing competition -- be it Singapore or Stockholm, Dubai or Hong Kong."

Interesting that he should have mentioned Dubai, since this is where the International Bar Association will be holding its annual conference later this month (look out for the ICLR's stand: we'll be there to promote our new online service, officially launched next week).

Interesting, too, that he should have mentioned Singapore. Bearing in minds its attractions as an international centre for litigation, I had been hoping, somewhat facetiously, and no doubt most unfairly, to describe the Rolls Building as a sort of "forum shopping mall". But then I googled the expression and found that there really is a shopping mall called The Forum -- which is in Singapore.

BabyBarista - Get ahead with the ICLR Online

We at the ICLR are all huge fans of Tim Kevan's BabyBarista, so you can imagine the excitment when our first sponosred post went live yesterday!

“Written by barristers for barristers is good enough for me. Particularly now that they’re now online”... Read the rest of the post online at BabyBarista and sign up for your free ICLR Online trial.

The above image is courtesy of the BabyBarista blog (illustrated by Alex Williams)