LexisNexis Rule of Law, Advancing Together 2014

01 December 2014 | Dr Marc K Peter

Opening Letter from Advancing Together: Rule of Law Updates and Perspectives, Volume 3 Issue 2 December 2014

The rule of law is a fundamental driver for advanced societies, providing certainty and access to justice for individuals and corporations. Legal content and technology organisations interact on many levels to support the rule of law (local and global, online and print, free and commercial), connecting various stakeholders with authoritative content and rich data via a range of platforms and channels suited to the individual's or organisation's needs.

LexisNexis® Butterworths, incorporated in the UK in 1818, Australia in 1911 and New Zealand in 1914, is a leading provider of content, workflow and productivity solutions to the legal community and a vital enabler of the rule of law across seven key areas:

1: Legally trained employees gather, edit and update legal and regulatory materials, ensuring access to comprehensive, current and high quality content from a central provider.

2: Value-add activities to enrich raw data, warehousing it in sophisticated databases and augmenting it to make it smart, accessible and applicable to diverse use cases: these activities include the building of databases (for instance LawNow, the complete set of Australian legislation), extensive content linking, the presentation of related content within relevant practice areas or jurisdictions, and the display of visual aids such as the famous CaseBase™ Case Citator "signals" which act as traffic lights for practitioners relying on case law.

3: The commissioning of expert authors from the academic and practitioner fields, helping to make the law understandable and accessible; more than 2,000 authors in the Pacific region are contributing to the massive analytical knowledge set available at LexisNexis. New approaches in content creation are adding new value to customers, such as the LexisNexis Practical Guidance suite of practical, checklist-based content.

4: Maintaining, expanding and supporting the channels and platforms which provide access to content, including through the timely publishing of print titles (textbooks, journals and newsletters), the enhancing of online databases and digital solutions, and the provision of training and customer service functions for those who rely on LexisNexis content and platforms.

5: Software solutions which provide content in a timely fashion within the practitioner's workflow, enabling efficient administration and management of the business and practice of law, such as LexisNexis Visualfiles for government agencies and in-house counsel (implemented in several Public Prosecution departments and Legal Aid organisations across Australia and New Zealand), or Lexis Affinity and PCLaw practice management solutions for law firms.

6: New technology-driven innovations, which take advantage of the latest IT capabilities to reduce risk and increase efficiencies, such as LexisNexis Red® (providing offline access to content on iPads® to Police prosecutors and litigators), Lexis for Microsoft Office® (enriching and fact-checking user-generated content with the LexisNexis online database), and new drafting solutions with Lexis Smart Precedents.

7: And most importantly, specific rule of law initiatives in the Asia-Pacific region making legal content available to under-served populations, such as through the publication of the Fiji Law Reports, a series of textbooks for practitioners in Papua New Guinea, and the free provision of online content to libraries on Pacific island nations.

LexisNexis and other legal content and technology organisations are some of the building blocks of the rule of law: it is a privilege to partner with the legal community to enable the advancement of society.