At first cite

Alistair King showcases Justis Publishing's new suite of editorial and indexing tools.

The law is a constantly evolving entity with roots in history and links to the past and, in due course, the future. It's therefore no surprise that many law firms have undergone exhaustive projects to link their knowhow documents, or at least the profiles of the same, to cited documents: cases, legislation and more on third-party subscription-based services such as Justis, LexisNexis and Westlaw. While there are a number of options for performing such a task, from manual editing to automated tools, there are two very obvious problems: the destination or format of these links can change; and it can be extremely time-consuming finding these references in the first place.
Recent history shows that online information providers large and small do change their platforms and often with it the way deep links to their services operate. Furthermore, with organisations regularly reviewing their subscriptions lest they fall victim to disproportionate price hikes, those that change find that their old links no longer work.
So if we accept that links need to be changed periodically what can we do?
There are two main options. Firstly, it is perfectly possible to manually identify all the citations in your database and change any links to the new format. But this is only practical if the numbers are small or you have a lot of spare cash to pay for external editorial services. Secondly, you could undertake your own expensive in-house development to create a tool for automating the process '“ or buy one in.
A new suite of editorial tools has been developed by Justis publishing to achieve the second option and in a far more scaleable and future-proof way than ever before by employing JustCite's citation index.
JustCite may be familiar to some readers as a searchable index of cases, legislation and commentary from the UK, Ireland, the EU and a growing number of other jurisdictions including Australia, Canada and Singapore. That it is, but in building this index JustCite's creators at Justis Publishing have come up with something else, something that has long been missing from legal information: an index of citations and destinations, which addresses what document the citation represents and where it can be found.
With this data at its heart the JustCite suite of tools facilitates a number of functions that are very common within law firms, including linking to documents cited within knowhow.
Enter the JustCite Link Studio and JustCite Toolbar.
Although there have been previous versions of Link Studio that automatically identify legal citations and insert links to full-text documents, JustCite Link Studio works very differently by using JustCite's citation index. The software allows individual or batch processing of html, Word, PDF and other document formats to automatically identify citations for any of the document types held on JustCite itself. Once identified, JustCite Link Studio inserts a link to JustCite that will either take the user to a record for the document on the JustCite website or redirect them seamlessly to the full text of the cited document on a predefined third-party website.
Therefore should the destination of these links need to change, all the changes can be done centrally on the JustCite account and no further identification of links within documents is required.
The second flagship tool in the suite is the JustCite Toolbar, an add-on for your web browser. Once installed users can click the JustCite Toolbar button on their browser toolbar and any web or intranet page they are viewing will be instantly scanned for recognised references. Once references are identified in the document a side panel opens showing a list of all references found. The user can then select to view information about the cited document and if required link to the full text of the document on many of the major legal information providers' sites.
Other tools are in development but the message is clear: legal information now has an index and that index is JustCite.