We’re proud to have played a part in making court judgments and tribunal decisions more open and accessible
We worked with The National Archives, one of the world’s leading digital archives, to create a new service to host court judgments and tribunal decisions in England and Wales
We’ve been working with The National Archives (TNA) to launch and iterate a new digital service for the uploading, storing, and distribution of court judgments and tribunal decisions.
The goal is to provide a single, accessible place where anyone – from the general public to legal professionals and publishers – can find public court judgments and tribunal decisions. The service plays an important role in open justice, with the retention and preservation of judgments guaranteed under primary legislation.
After the initial launch, we’ve continued to support TNA to improve the service. Recently we’ve been working on the core data platform to make sure it’s capable of horizontal scaling to cover more documents from more courts and tribunals, and establishing a robust, curatable data foundation which will support future use of AI.
Outcome
We got the new Find Case Law service up and running within a strict 3 month deadline. When the site went live, it meant anyone with an interest could view, browse, and search court judgments and tribunal decisions.
The system stores judgments in XML format, which can be viewed as accessible HTML, and downloaded as PDF or machine-readable XML, and allows editors to review, publish and un-publish decisions. It’s built as a high availability platform that can handle significant spikes in demand. This means it can withstand sudden increases in traffic from landmark judgments that make the headlines.
“The launch of the new judgments service at The National Archives is a hugely significant step for open justice. For the first time, the retention and preservation of judgments from courts and tribunals in England and Wales is guaranteed under primary legislation, as is the right for the public to obtain access to these documents.“
Dr Natalie Byrom, Director of Research at The Legal Education Foundation
“Working with dxw to launch our new Find Case Law service has been a brilliant, if hair-raising experience! We did not have much time and had huge expectations to contend with but colleagues from dxw pulled together with TNA folk and others, remained calm, helped us ruthlessly re-prioritise and still managed to keep a sense of humour throughout. I’m incredibly grateful for all their hard work and dedication, they really care and that’s priceless.”
Nicki Welch, Service Owner for Access to Digital Records at The National Archives
What we did
A pragmatic approach to launch
We had to take a pragmatic approach to the initial launch and flex our processes due to the short timeframe and the number of partners and systems involved.
- Prioritisation: We worked with the TNA team to prioritise the critical path to getting the site live, making a plan to come back to refine certain aspects after the live date.
- Parallel development: Strong ongoing communication between the partners involved and well defined boundaries between responsibilities for the different technical components, meant development on many parts of the system could proceed in parallel.
- Designed for adaptability: We designed the architecture for change and adaptability, and built the system in a way that means it is cost effective to amend and can be hosted by TNA in future.
Ongoing technical development
Our recent work has focused on strengthening Find Case Law’s technical foundation, scalability, and readiness for the future.
(i) Data platform re-architecture and scaling
We have re-architected the data platform for huge horizontal scaling. The platform now absorbs a significantly higher volume of judgments from a wider range of courts and tribunals (including historical documents).
(ii) Robust and resilient pipeline
We focused on creating a resilient pipeline that:
- ingests documents, extracts meaning, and cleanses the data
- ensures no Personally Identifiable Information (PII) has accidentally leaked through
- produces accessible and searchable material from previously inaccessible Word documents.
(iii) Enhancing data curation for AI
The re-architecture has been designed to handle large volumes of data in a “curatable way.” This means making sure documents are accurately described and well-tagged, and establishes a solid foundation for future users who will want to use AI.
The curation also improves the linking of related judgments, appeals and legislation.
(iv) Conveying semantic meaning
The next step will be to explore how to properly convey the semantic meaning in legal language to AI agents. Legal language has subtly different meanings from everyday English, so this work is crucial for teaching AI to use the information correctly and prompting a human check to prevent errors.
We came across a recent example of an LLM creating a non-existent case, that was subsequently referenced by a lawyer in court. Something to avoid!