About JADE 6.3

The JADE legal research team is reaching a new milestone: our 1,000th release. Leading up to this big event, we are releasing a number of new features. In JADE 6.3 (Build 954) we will feature the following:

1. Improved search connectors. Use any search connector from any search engine and it will work. We are working on a separate post to show you the power of the new connectors, including some unique ones added by JADE. Many of our improved search connectors are available to all users. However, we would really love you to become a JADE professional user. Your support as a professional user is what powers our further development of JADE.
2. Phrase in context display and searching. With this feature, you will be able to see at a glance words and phrases which our cyborgs editors have identified as significant and find other case law and legislative materials with similar words or phrases used in the same or similar context. Sounds bland, but our beta testers have been more excited than we have seen them for a long while. So excited that we brought forward the release. Phrase in context is only available to JADE professional users.
3. Improvements to visualisation. We have simplified some of the visualisation features. These visualisation features are available only to JADE professional users.
4. Lots of underlying changes to make the magic happen as quickly as you have come to expect. This required re-engineering and lots of amazing computational gymnastics. Our whiteboard has seen some intensive battles between competing algorithms and passionate statisticians.
5. More extensive updates to legislation and new case law. Stay tuned for more details about these.

There’s much more to report. We will do it when we reach the next release.

About the JADE release schedules

We release between two and six builds per week. When we are making changes, we frequently release about ten builds. Not all builds contain user-facing features. Much of what we do is to improve JADE from the inside and to prepare our systems for important updates. For each important update, we increment the minor number. In recent times:

• JADE 6.1 contained amazing new document management features, including filters, navigation tools, and many UI enhancements. We updated our API to power JADE.WORLD.
• JADE 6.2 contained a complete overhaul and improvement of our search systems, including better highlighting and distributed search. It also contained a number of UI refinements.
• JADE 6.3 contains phrase in context (building extensively upon the foundation laid by JADE 6.1 and 6.2). As you’d expect, it contained a number of UI enhancements and improvements to visualisation. We did a huge amount of re-engineering of the underlying systems to make unnecessary complexity hidden from our research-hungry legal professionals.

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