A brief thread on a new feature we've rolled out at @vizlegal that we're particularly proud of! Apologies to any non legal types (but techies might like it too!).
One complaint we've heard over and over again from Irish legal practitioners is trouble with court rules. "Messy", "difficult", "might be out of date" and some more choice words have been used to describe them..
So Irish court rules are bit like the CPRs in England & Wales. They're the legal basis/rules for how practitioners interact with the courts. In Ireland they are based on Statutory Instruments that stretch back to at least 1986.
Since 1986 though, like most laws, they've been amended, substituted or changed in one way or another repeatedly. This makes knowing the *current* state of the rules rather difficult...
Current solutions including books (new editions can cost up to €1k) which contain annotated consolidated rules. Electronic versions are also available via the well known providers. But we wanted to try something to solve this perplexing problem.
First: what technology would suit a document versioning problem, BLOCKCHAIN I hear you scream. Well, no. You could certain use blockchain, but it doesn't *necessarily* help much. We instead chose Git (specifically Gitlab).
We've started with a date zero for our current consolidated version. These are hand consolidated. But we can version all *future* changes over time, so we can timeslide if we need to between x and y dates in the future, and see how stuff evolves.
For the text we picked Markdown - inside Microsoft Visual Studio Code 2, and placed all the statutes in there in Markdown (github style) format. This keeps all the text consistent and clean. It also means it's easy to "deploy" text changes to our internal Git repo.
When a new amendment appear (some are coming later this month) we can slot them quickly and easily into our existing repo, and version it. The user always has the most up to date version of the consolidation. We could also add tools to "go back in time" on the rule.
The result on our side looks like this (Order 1, Superior Court rules) in Markdown "code". It outputs that into nice clean HTML. Notice how URLs to primary legislation are added with a particular syntax = [ text ] ( link ) 
We then push all this nice markdown into our application. Users can very quickly find the rule they need by title or by number. All of them are fully consolidated. So our users no longer have to guess if the rule is "out of date" or compare PDFs to figure out the consolidation.
One thing we like about this approach is that it's pretty scalable (within reason). We're not quite at the stage of auto consolidating statutes, but this approach makes it easy for us to keep up to date. We could apply it to other rules in other jurisdictions, or other statutes.
Next steps: Make it all very very mobile friendly so it's just as easy on your phone as it is on your laptop. We like the idea of solicitors or barristers quickly double checking a rule this way (with perhaps some local storage in the event of no coverage in remote courts).
Making it all very easy to: see your consolidated rules, track your cases, know your diaries and search & bookmark judgments all rolled into one application. If you're an Irish practitioner, drop me a line! 😊
#legaltech FTW! 😊🎉🍾
