The electronic law market is about to get more competitive and better for consumers.
Lawyers and others who use Commonwealth statutes and case reports are likely to be beneficiaries of a government project designed to bring the law to the people.
The Attorney-General’s Department has put its Scale service into Australian Government Publishing Service shops for people to browse Commonwealth statutes, regulations and court judgments for nothing. There will be a formal opening of the service soon (when the pollies come back from the winter break most likely).
However, SCALE is virtually unusable by the new generation of computer users who demand point-and-click. The department has let a tender to put a friendly Windows, Mac and DOS face on it so ordinary mortals can find the law on cheques, social security, native title or whatever.
This will take about six months. When it is done people with computers and modems will be able to dial in, for a fee, and extract their law.
At present the only public access to SCALE is through Info-One. It costs about $60 an hour.
Info-One also does most state case and statute law.
The biggest electronic law player DiskRom Australia, which publishes all Commonwealth law and statutes and Victoria and NSW law and special commercial collections on CD-ROM, updated monthly. Info-One publishes only state law on CD-ROM, updated quarterly.
Queensland publishes its own law electronically and will not let anyone else near it.
One of the greatest difficulties with legal publishing (electronic or paper) is updating.
Parliament passes ever more laws in ever more complicated ways. One Act can amend dozens of others. Regulations fall out of print, yet we are deemed not to be ignorant of them.
The Attorney-General, Michael Lavarch, has recognised the problem. After date to be fixed next year, regulations will not be law until they are available on the electronic database.
Consolidation of statute law is a huge task. There are about 90,000 sections in about 4500 Acts of Parliament still on the statute books. Some Acts have been amended scores of times, removing phrases, inserting words and sections. Reprints used to be done every now and then, but until Diskrom completed the task electronically in October last year there had never been a complete up-to-date consolidation on paper or electronically.
The Attorney-General’s Department has just finished the task at a cost of $700,000, somewhat re-inventing the wheel and duplicating what Diskrom had already done.
The department argues, however, that its version is the official version and it is available by modem, updated daily whereas CD-ROMs are not updated daily.
The counter arguments are that unofficial commercial paper versions of the law (usually the annotated CCH versions) are used all the time in Australian courts and are accepted by the judiciary as accurate.
DiskRom says that in any event it has found occasional inaccuracies in the SCALE version.
On the update question, Diskrom says other than some very rare emergency Acts, all Acts of Parliament are passed and are in print well before their official commencement date. Diskrom says its monthly re-issue of the CDs including laws that are to come into effect in the next month can give an up-to-date database when supplemented by fortnightly disks or the rare fax and clients get the many advantages of CD-ROM rather than clumsy, slow modems.
There is no doubt that CD searching is faster than modem and more reliable because you do not have to battle through communications software and phone lines and still not get a connection.
“”I’m sorry, Your Honour, I cannot get a connection with the modem.”
It will not be long before laptops with CD-ROM are commonplace in the courts (on the bench as well as at the bar table). The television shots of lawyers pushing trolleys of books into court like the disabled will be a thing of the past.
I used bound volumes for legal research (insofar as any law a journalist does can be called research) for about 15 years, I have been using Scale and other Info-One electronic databases for about seven years and Diskrom Australia CD-ROM for four days. If, right now, I wanted to search Commonwealth law on a matter (case or statute), I would go for the CD-ROM.
The reasons? Speed, reliability and Diskrom’s software which captures your research trail window by window and enables you to set up a tidy electronic equivalent of little bits of sticky yellow paper in dozens of volumes.
Diskrom has about 40 staff attending to the database and software at the premises in Northbourne Avenue. It provides three services. Commonwealth, Victorian and NSW statutes; Federal case law and Commercial law (Commonwealth tax, company and business law). Each service fits on one CD and CDs are provided monthly to subscribers. The stand-alone costs are $1100 for the commercial and $2500 each for the others per year. Extra users cost more.
It provides other smaller services on disk.
It sounds expensive, but the case and statute law is the equivalent of 83 hours logged it to Scale via Info-One. Moreover, you could probably twist their arm for discounts.
There is no comparison with bound volumes. Bound volumes of case and statute law will simply fade away an uneconomic. The federal case law takes at least four metres of shelf space and it fits on one CD. And you can do a search through the five metres of paper for every instance of a word or word combination of words in five seconds.
It is silly this is not in every MPs’ electoral office. It is available at the House. Most medium and large legal firms have it.
Once the base work has been done, the cost of extra CDs is trivial (a few dollars each), unlike bound volumes.
The advantage of CD is you know what the costs are up front; the advantage of modem access is you pay only for only what you use.
I suspect the law market will divide. One-off, occasional and less wealthy users of Commonwealth law will go for AG’s new service when it becomes usable next year. But the medium and large accounting and law firms will go for the CD, and an increasing number of smaller firms will, too. Also, as the die-hard paper users (over 45-year-olds) in both professions retire, there will be more CD users. The price of the CD service is likely to come down or remain static as the software and research tools improve. The cost of the CDs for professionals is trivial compared to its power and efficiency.
Despite the great technological advances, though, we are still some way off from having the statute and case law of the Commonwealth and all the states available in one service. That is something for the agenda of the next COAG meeting.