Website reviews

CaseCheck

www.casecheck.co.uk

CaseCheck is basically a website which delivers its users an up-to-date collection of case summaries, together with links to the full judgments on the Scottish Court Service (www.scotcourts.gov.uk) or employment appeal tribunal (www.employmentappeals.gov.uk) websites.

Let’s start with the look of the site and how well it works. It is quite a neat little site and easy enough to navigate. There are however several points on which it fails to meet the necessary standards for web accessibility even at priority 1 – which means that one or more groups of users will find it impossible to access information. There are also a few dead hyperlinks and some formatting problems caused (I assume) by the automated way in which content is added.

I must confess that when the site was first drawn to my attention, I did wonder why one would not simply use the Scottish Courts website or www.bailii.org (the British and Irish Legal Information Institute) to access the cases directly? To be honest, there is a large part of me still asking that question.

The answer, as given by Scots law blogger Jonathan Mitchell QC (www.jonathanmitchell.info), is that “Casecheck has a commentary, an RSS feed and an email service.” The email service is a useful one and sends an email with the week’s new cases every seven days. While you could simply check, the reminder is helpful. This is a feature the House of Lords website has for its judicial decisions, but as yet the Scottish Court Service does not.

An RSS feed, for those who make use of RSS readers, is another way of getting the same information, but on an ongoing case by case basis, rather than weekly. You can choose to be notified of the latest cases, the latest articles and/or the latest recruitment vacancies. I would have liked to be able to specify the type of case (to be notified only when a new judicial review case, for example, is added), but this feature doesn’t appear to be available at the moment. Perhaps it will be added as the site develops?

Finally, the commentary – undoubtedly this is a useful feature, which saves the user from having to read through the judgments of every case to access those which interest him or her most. The summary provides cross-references to the relevant legislation, which is a nice touch and works well. On the downside, there are not as many categories of case as there could be (and fewer, certainly, than the Scottish Court Service offers).

Below the summary of each case, there is space for comments from registered users. There are some official commenters who are billed as providing expert opinion on the cases – and they do so in a succinct and informative manner. Beyond these few, there seems to be precious little in the way of comments or discussion by the solicitors using the site. I imagine this is one of those features that will prove to be of tremendous value in due course. However at the moment, with so few participating, it has still to reach its full potential.

As I have already alluded to, the site has a selection of articles on various legal topics including an entertaining and informative regular feature “Week on the Web”, interviews with various legal personalities, articles on legal technology, and so on. I would say that the standout feature is the week on the web, which could easily occupy the front page of the site, rather than being tucked away, one link back.

The recruitment section pulls in vacancies from a couple of agencies and allows the user to select vacancies by category (commercial property, employment law etc). The legislation links section notes that it is currently experiencing formatting difficulties, and the organisation of the links I felt could be better – this section needs some more thought.

I realise that this probably reads like a long list of complaints, and there are a number of things to complain about. However, this is still a young website and it would be unfair to focus on the teething problems when, overall, it is a good idea and has been reasonably well executed. The site is certainly worth bookmarking as it seems to be “one to watch”.