Faster pussycat. Easier, Faster, Better

In our 2015 JADE Review, we explained the JADE credo: easier, faster.

We have spent 2016, continuing our quest to make JADE the best legal research platform for legal professionals. Our team has grown, with more dedicated JADE team members.

We delivered regular and special training events in Adelaide, Brisbane, Canberra, Hobart, London, Melbourne, Oxfordshire, Perth, San Francisco, and Sydney.

The whole BarNet team sends greetings, and wishes you, our dear reader, happy holidays.

Key improvements we made to JADE in 2016

JADE Platform enhancements

Here are just a few of the amazing improvements we made during 2016 to the JADE Research Platform (for the improvements made in 2015, see our 2015 review):

• Ease of inclusion and citation
  • Intelligent URLS. We updated all of our URLs to a format which allows you to cite to JADE at the paragraph or section level. This makes it easy to cut and paste JADE content into your opinions or blogs and have JADE tell you about updates. You can use any citation scheme as well, no need to know the internal JADE references. More about this in a separate post.
  • Copy and paste with ease. We are making it easier to incorporate JADE content into your work. Writing submissions and need to grab the correct citation, it’s easy with JADE. More about this in a separate post.
  • Customised annotations. With new features, JADE helps you to find the law and remember it. With recent changes, we also make it easier for you to duplicate your annotations and share them with colleagues.
• Improved JADE professional features. After all, our JADE professional users support the development of JADE, so you deserve regular updates. Here a just a few of the exciting improvements we made to JADE professional:
  • Document upload. We improved document upload. With the work we have undertaken on citations our amazing upload tool now detects more citation errors (such as where the case name and citation don’t match, or where the page cited does not come within the relevant citation. More about this in a separate post.
  • Legislation histories. We extended our very popular and time saving visual history features from Commonwealth legislation to New South Wales, Queensland, and Victorian legislation. We are in the process of adding South Australia, Tasmania, the Australian Capital Territory, and the Northern Territory. We are continuing to seek access to Western Australian statutory material.
  • Victorian Reports are live and linked into JADE. Links to the authorised Victorian Reports version of the decision since [1957] VR to date. We are in the process of adding in content from 1863 onwards, but, of course, working backwards. This is linked to the Victorian Reports Pay Per View portal, which makes using the Victorian Reports easier than ever.
  • Tracking legislative and regulatory changes. You can set up an alert to track changes in legislation, including any compilations. For example, when a new compilation of an Act has been released.
• We implemented the second part of our extensive litigation histories project for most intermediate appellate courts and the High Court of Australia, which includes (as with the first part):
  • (in the case of the High Court) references to written submissions, special leave hearings, and transcript.
  • (in the case of all courts) tracing as many decisions as we can find, including earlier interlocutory hearings; and
  • letting you know (as best we can) that a decision you are reading has received subsequent appellate consideration, including from the FCCA and AATA, or in the case of some intermediate appellate courts and the High Court of Australia, when a decision is pending, and, in the case of the High Court, when special leave has been granted or refused.

We have many more improvements in the pipeline for early 2017. If you have suggestions for improvements, please let us know.

More content in the JADE Content Ecosystem

We put even more content into the JADE system. Here’s a brief snapshot:

• Including links to all authorised report and leading specialised report series. This means that:
  • you can search by reference to reported citations, without needing to know the Medium Neutral Citation. Even better, if you subscribe to these reports, you can see at a glance if a decision has been reported and use JADE to reliably locate the authorised report citation. We added additional report series coverage in 2016.
  • we now include the following additional report series citations, and we have been progressively backfilling them to the entire series where possible, even if there is no corresponding Medium Neutral Citation):
    • All current Australian Authorised reports series, ACTR, NSWLR, NTR, QdR, SASR, TasR, VR, and WAR;
    • Administrative Law Decisions (ALD);
    • Butterworths Property Reports (BPR);
    • Local Government and Environmental Reports of Australia (LGERA);
    • Australian Criminal Reports (ACR, ACrimR, A Crim R);
    • Banking and Finance Reports of Australia (BFRA);
    • Australian Tax Cases (ATC);
    • Motor Vehicle Reports (MVR);
    • Family Law Reports (Fam LR); and
    • Intellectual Property Reports (IPR).
    • Historial report series: NSWR, SR(NSW), VLR, etc.
    • State Reports (Western Australia) (SR (WA))
    • Strata Title Reports (New South Wales) (STR (NSW))
    • All England Reports (All ER)
• Even more Court and Tribunal content. During 2016, driven by requests from our users, we added many additional courts and tribunals to the JADE Corpus, including:
  • Queensland Land Court (QLC)
  • Queensland Land Court – Appeals Cases (QLAC)
  • Queensland Children’s Court (QChC)
  • Magistrates’ Court of Queensland – Children’s Court (QChCM)
  • Northern Territory Local Court (NTLC)
  • Family Court of Western Australia (FCWA)
  • Family Court of Western Australia – Magistrates (FCWAM).

New reading and reporting formats

• We made new formats for our JADE professional users, including:
  • Further enhancement to our professional layout: under the Print and Export tab there is now a Professional Layout option for cases post 2013 which puts the unreported decision in a familiar law report format.
  • The Collation of full-text decisions into a single PDF, if you upload full-text decisions.

JADE World launched

We added more content to our side project, JADE World which was launched in 2015. JADE World aggregates selected leading blogs and tweets referring to cases or statutes and integrates them with content found in JADE as an additional tool for maintaining current awareness.

Thank you for your support

The support we’ve received and continue to receive from all the JADE Professional subscriptions is overwhelming. Thanks to you we’re in a good position to surpass JADE 2015 in the new year. Be ready for the new JADE features in 2017.

See you in January.

Categories: Uncategorized, Year in Review