We have made two releases of JADE in the past week

It has been a busy week for the BarNet JADE team. Our editors have been checking cases and citations and our design team has been improving our parsers and making the JADE legal research platform even easier to use for the legal professional.

In response to user comments, we have turned off the Chrome Plugin suggestion. However, you should try the plug in, or switch to Firefox, Chrome, or Safari. Why? Because you will find the speed of JADE within these browsers to be much faster.

New Features (since CaseTrace)

Apart from all of the behind the scenes improvements, we have been including many of the features requested by our users into JADE. We have introduced two new features, one in each release.

• Research Tools (part I)
• Clouds

Research Tools

JADE is a legal research platform. We are lawyers ourselves and we do a lot of online legal research. We also know that our colleagues have different ways of doing legal research. Some like to browse for inspiration, others like to use the Google-like simplicity of the JADE Go Bar at the top of each page, and others like to use the new CaseTrace feature.

JADE’s motto is “find the law, don’t lose it”. We have often conducted research late at night on other systems and have found a ‘perfect case’ only to lose it the next morning when preparing for Court. We want to help others to avoid this kind of platform-inflicted time wastage.

In broad terms, JADE’s legal research tools will include the following features:

• the ability to ‘tag’ a case so that you can return to it at the end of having trawled through all the authorities (particularly using our CaseTrace feature);
• a place to go where you know you can always retrieve your earlier searches or tagged items;
• a means by which you can automatically conduct research on your found (or tagged) decisions;
• a means by which you can be kept up-to-date on developments which might affect or consider your tagged decisions; and
• a means by which to extract that information into a form ready for Court, or for advices, or for further research.

Part one of our research tools puts the widget in place. We have to start somewhere.

If you would like to follow along, here is the URL: http://jade.barnet.com.au/Jade.html#t=browse

If you clicked on that link, here a bit of what you will see:

And here is a close up of the left hand side of the first item in the list (at least as at 23 April 2010):

Notice the Flags? These tell you that the case has been tagged. The first one tells you that there are three public tags, and the second one tells you that you (if you are me) have tagged it as well.

Click on the Widget and this is what you will see:

Try using it and let us know what you think. Feedback is always welcomed.

We will show you the other parts of the research system in the near future.

Clouds

Clouds are useful to work out something about the popular terms used within a particular database. As you might expect, JADE Clouds are better than your average Cloud.

You will find them inside the JADE Browser. Here a screenshot:

Let’s zoom in:

Click on cloud and you will see this on the right hand side of the screen:

You can display a cloud by topic, we have done here. Or you can display a general cloud. Try it.

We click on “burden of proof” and this following case appears:

As you can see, clouds are a useful way to navigate through the cases within JADE.

We have a little way to go with the cloud interface. So bear with us while we make it better.

What’s around the corner?

We have many plans. We will tell you about a few of them in our next post.

Suggestions?

If you have any suggestions for new features or improvements to existing ones, we’d love to hear about them. Simply send us an email to jade@barnet.com.au or click on the feedback tab within JADE.

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