A new service is harnessing over 17,000 pieces of legislation dating back to 1267 AD and 300,000 pages of legal material to give lawyers information about any point of law within seconds.
February 8, 1999 - Reed Elsevier's legal publishing division Butterworths has brought in Cambridge technology company Autonomy to help with a difficult information balancing act: on the one hand, its Legislation Direct (a database which includes every legal act and statutory instrument in force in England and Wales), and Halsbury's Laws Direct (the 50 volume legal bible compiled since 1908) contained nearly 800 years worth of U.K. case law, legislation and analysis. On the other hand, the lawyers who subscribe to Butterworths' online service needed speedy access to Butterworths' ever-growing source of disparate legal information, as well as fast, relevant answers to complex legal questions derived and synthesized from that information.
Autonomy's technology now enables Butterworths' online service subscribers to automatically access over 17,000 pieces of legislation dating back to 1267 AD and more than 300,000 pages of legal material about any point of law right on their desks. As Ivan Darby, Butterworths' Director of Electronic Publishing, points out: "Obviously a lawyer's time is at a premium, and having to leave your desk and manually go through countless legal texts is practically a thing of the past for anyone who uses this service. We are giving them all the information they need on their desk-top."
The job is done automatically
Autonomy's technology automatically reads, understands, categorizes and links the thousands of pieces of legal knowledge contained within Legislation Direct and Halsbury's Laws Direct. Given the volume of legal information contained within the service - and the alarming pace at which such information is constantly expanding - a company such as Butterworths would normally have had to hire hundreds of editorial staff to accomplish these tasks manually. Instead, thanks to Autonomy, all this valuable time and money can be devoted to enhancing the services on offer to lawyers who can, in turn, less expensively and more accurately serve their clients.
Cherie Booth, QC
By appreciating the context of information, Autonomy's technology understands how disparate pieces of information relate to each other, and automatically links them. At the launch of Halsbury's Laws Direct, Cherie Booth QC gave an example of how this can help lawyers. "I was able to access a particularly interesting point about the role of the bailiff in collecting the community charge. I didn't have to bring the volume back with me... it (Halsbury's Laws Direct) took me straight to the relevant volume and passage. When I read the passage in the volume, it referred to a case, which was in the all-England law report. I clicked on the case citation and there was the law report for me to read as well."
The law library on your desktop
According to Ivan Darby, Butterworths Director of Electronic Publishing, "a good example of why all the prompts and numerous hyperlinks are so important is the Taxes Management Act 1970, section 98, which currently contains over 90 separate amendments made by a variety of other enactments."
According to Autonomy CEO Mike Lynch, "Publishers such as Butterworths, whose works contain masses of legalistic and technical information which constantly changes over time, are acutely aware of the limitations of manual or keyword-based approaches." Because Autonomy analyzes the overall patterns in a piece of text, it can identify the main ideas in an article whether or not a particular keyword is present. "This means that Autonomy's technology is smart enough to spot similar ideas in cases involving plaintiffs as diverse as medical professionals and landowners, even if the cases took place hundreds of years apart, and the vocabulary has very little in common."
Notes for Editors
Butterworths online services can be accessed at http://www.butterworths.co.uk/. There is a free one-week trial for users.Autonomy (www.autonomy.com) has found a way of making computers understand meaning. By automatically organizing, linking and distributing information, the company's Agentware software cuts out the need for organizations to spend time and money having an army of people to identify, tag and hyper-link every piece of information.
Autonomy was founded in 1996 and has offices in San Francisco, California and Cambridge, England. In addition to Butterworths, Autonomy customers include News Corp., MacMillan Publishing, Associated Press, Barclays Bank, Virgin, Shell International, Semi-Tech, The Royal Mail and Unilever. On July 10, 1998, the company went public on the EASDAQ exchange, achieving a valuation of $165 million and raising $35 million dollars.
Butterworths is a member of the Reed Elsevier plc Group. A world leading publisher and information provider whose activities include scientific, professional and business publishing. Butterworths holds the 1998 Legal Office Technology Award for best legal website and is Prepress and Publishing Awards - Gold Award winner - Innovation in Publishing Award 1998.
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