Legal index

Press, 19 July 1988, Page 24

Legal index

Law Library Management, Ltd, a firm of law library consultants in Auckland, has developed a database index to recent New Zealand case law, called Briefcase. The database comprises an index of cases noted in the “Capital Letter,” “Butterworths Current Law,” “New Zealand Recent Law” and “Consolidated Case Annotations.” The directors of LLM, Suzanne Dowling and Faye Spence, worked in law firms before establishing a consultancy service in 1985. For the last year the consultancy has employed legal indexers to abstract each case noted in the alerting literature and to determine whether cases have been reported. A database manager has overseen the design and development of the computerised database and the input of information. The database covers all judgments noted in publications, from January 1986. Briefcase will be supplied on diskettes. Monthly updates will be provided as part of the subscription service. Briefcase was produced using Inmagic software, text indexing and retrieval software developed by Inmagic, an American information consultancy. It is now used for litigation support and internal information management by 500 law firms in the United States. The software provides the ability to search on all words and combinations of words in the Briefcase database; cases can be quickly tracked by case and party names, subject, statutes or regulations cited, other cases cited, summary of the original case notes or other details such as judgement date, court or judge.

LLM is also offering a “phone-in” service for Briefcase.