BAILII looks for help

The British and Irish Legal Information Institute (BAILII) is a non-profit-making charitable trust which is building and operating an interactive database of full text primary legal materials available without charge on the internet. BAILII provides, by utilising low-cost methods, a growing amount of primary and secondary legal material which can be browsed by the user and/or located by using the BAILII search engine. The service is a major tool for legal research. Its continued availability and development is of major importance to the practice and teaching of law.

Who uses BAILII?

• 31,590 requests per day, from all parts of the British Isles
• 38% of our users are legal professional
• of those 47% are solicitors and 53% are counsel
• of these legal professionals 71% use BAILII at least once a week
• 41% of professional users rate BAILII as very important, 32% important, 26% useful, and only 1% not important.

There are also many users from the general public or those outside Great Britain and Ireland who wish to gain ready access to the key texts of our justice system.

What can I get on BAILII?

The BAILII website now contains the key common law databases of recent decisions of the Privy Council, House of Lords, Court of Session, Court of Appeal, Irish Supreme Court, other courts and tribunals, and legislation from three jurisdictions. Very recently the Law Commission of England and Wales and the Scottish Law Commission papers and reports have been added to the existing Irish Law Reform Commission materials.

The website also contains materials not available from any other free source. All the data have been converted into a consistent format and a generalised set of search and hypertext facilities added; this, among other advantages, allows searching across all databases and all jurisdictions.

How the site works now

The original BAILII website was developed by the Australasian Legal Information Institute (AustLII). The system is closely based on the AustLII model and sophisticated software that drives the BAILII website is provided by AustLII.

BAILII was incorporated as a charity in December 2000. BAILII is currently based at the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies, University of London, at 17 Russell Square, London WC1B 5DR, and at the Faculty of Law of University College Cork. BAILII employs a full time executive director, a full time system administrator/developer and a part time project officer. Editorial work also takes place in Cork.

BAILII is associated with initiatives in other countries to establish similar facilities, including AustLII (Australasia, at www.austlii.org), CanLII (Canada, at www.canlii.org), PacLII (Pacific Islands, at www.paclii.org), HKLII (Hong Kong, at www.hklii.org), SafLII (South Africa, at www.saflii.org) and indeed a single site which tries to include all the materials offered from those above, WorldLII at www.worldlii.org.

Further information about BAILII is available on its website at www.bailii.org .

Future work at BAILII

A visit to our site will show how much we have achieved to date. By the end of 2004 we hope we will have vastly increased the number of current judgments posted daily to the site, including those from more leading appeal tribunals. We are actively exploring ways to increase our coverage of material from Scotland, Northern Ireland, and Ireland. If, as we hope, we can secure access to the majority of these legal materials, BAILII will be an even more notable resource for practitioners, litigants, academics and students and a major resource to help the public increase their knowledge of our legal system.

The main objectives over the next three years are:

• to maintain the website and the availability of existing databases of materials;
• to update the existing databases with new material on a regular basis;
• to establish backup servers in order to achieve a more secure technical infrastructure;
• to continue to improve the quality of new data and the functionality of the system;
• to obtain additional data in order to extend coverage;
• to promote the service and public access to primary legal materials in general.

How you can help

BAILII believes its project is a major contribution to the administration of justice and to open government. It has been successful in attracting funding in the past, and it now seeks further funding from new sources for its continued operation and development.

BAILII is seeking £50,000 per year for a three year period, which will assist it to continue the expansion of the project by developing the scope of its services.

Henry Brooke (Lord Justice Brooke), Chairman of the Trustees