Jade is an open access legal research platform.

We are very proud of that. Please help us to make JADE even better.

We hope that you will help us to make JADE even better.

Some recent enhancements

• The JADE citator now indexes a decision, even if the full text is not in JADE.
  • We show you the citations in context. We show you alternative citations, where we can infer those. This is very much a work in progress.
    
• We provide pin-point section-based links to legislation. We are working on point-in-time linkages. Parsing of legislation is incredibly complex. It is a work in progress but we hope that you will find it already useful.
• We have further refined our case and legislation parsers to make JADE more accurate and usable.
• We have made lots of bug fixes and little enhancements to make JADE work better with computers and portable devices.
  
• You can also see the text of later citations all in the one place for a previous case. Just like the reverse of CaseTrace.
• We have enhanced printing and output of decisions.

How is JADE different from other legal research systems?

We are often asked that question. Our answer is to try JADE and you should see how it will forever change the way you do online legal research. This used to be called electronic legal research.

Unlike other online systems, JADE provides you with a format which is as easy to read and work with as a piece of paper, but with search that works, pin-point case and statutory linkages.

We are supported by the Australian Legal Community

The popularity of JADE is growing and with it, we are getting increased support from a community of legal scholars. If you are already part of our growing community of panellists and supporters, thank you!

We are obtaining direct feeds where possible

We are now receiving all recent decisions directly from the High Court of Australia and many other Australian Courts and Tribunals. Direct feeds help us to ensure the accuracy, coverage and timeliness of the cases which you access on JADE. We have many exciting enhancements planned before the beginning of Law Term 2011. This includes numerous enhancements to legislation.

Plaintiff M61/2010E v Commonwealth of Australia & Ors and Plaintiff M69 of 2010 v Commonwealth of Australia & Ors, 11 November 2010

The High Court unanimously found that the provisions of the Migration Act and Australian case law were binding in the consideration and processing of an application for refugee status conducted through an off-shore processing regime. When you click through to this case from your JADE email alert or directly at the JADE website you will also retrieve the Case Trace list of cases cited. Click on view full report to go to the list of all cases cited in the Judgement. Case Trace allows you to easily and effectively understand the decision in the context of the case law on which it is based.

This case was referred to several of the JADE expert panels for assessment and ranking as to precedential importance. Expert panels are a unique part of the JADE system. They allow the legal community which uses JADE to have direct input into the processing of identifying the most significant decisions in various areas of law and will eventually will be the basis of the JADE commentary services.

If you would like to be involved in panels in an area of specialist expertise please select from our existing panels or reply to this email to suggest a new one!

Making Search easer and more effective. The JADE google like search is designed to understand your search and return relevant and accurate results. People tell us that with JADE they find the right case, they find the hard to find cases and they appreciate the fact that they don’t need to navigate impenetrable search systems or a sea of irrelevant search results.

Search Results with which you can work. The search results feature ‘bars’ which indicate the number of cases cited by that decision, and the number of times a case has been subsequently cited. If you are starting to accumulate a list of cases to review, this can be of great assistance.  What is more, JADE allows you to print your cases in a format designed to be read on paper not on screen. A welcome change!

If you have ideas about ways in which we can improve the JADE search system please tell us now. We plan to do a major upgrade of the search system during 2011.

Please get involved. We’d love you to become involved in making JADE even better.  If you would like to become a member of one of our panels, simply click on the panels tab and apply for membership. If you wish to suggest a new panel, please let us know by replying to this email. Being a panel member is a great way of sharing your expertise with the entire Australian and international legal community.

Please tell your friends. With more subscribers to JADE, we are encouraged to make an even better system for legal professionals. Ask your friends to subscribe today: http://jade.barnet.com.au. There is no charge to use JADE. You don’t need to log into JADE to use it. However, by registering and logging in, you will be able to gain access to additional features, including our  popular JADE marks and the ability to customise your alerts. If you blog about us, please let us know! Please share your JADE searching success stories with us too.

We have lots planned for JADE for the little bit that remains of this year and hope to move mountains in the vast expanse of the new year.

Categories: New Features, Uncategorized, User Guides