Hello, and welcome to our first edition of KeyNews in 2020.

Our year has been off to a flying start and with it has come what seems like another increase in the already frenetic pace of change within the legal industry.

At LexisNexis®, we are continuously pursuing new and technology-driven ways to create efficient legal solutions, practice management and workflow tools to support you in surpassing client expectations.

This is why we are so pleased to have released our brand-new AI-driven feature, ‘Similar Issues’, in our Lexis Advance® platform.  The new feature uses algorithms and natural language processing to identify semantic similarities between different judgements and provides more options for terminology to search in addition to lines of argument and other useful judgements outside the established run of citing relationships.

We have also been exceptionally busy with our Rule of Law activities over the past few months and are delighted to announce that we have won a tender to partner with the Cook Islands Government to begin consolidation of the South Pacific nation’s legislation.  We will be meeting with a variety of legal stakeholders including the Solicitor-General and senior Crown Law Office teams to help improve access to the laws of the Cook Islands and strengthen the capacity of the Cook Islands legal and judicial system.

Closer to home we recently celebrated the launch of our Rule of Law Foundation with a book drive to support children’s literacy in Liberia while several of our staff members have been involved in a  global LexisNexis initiative to produce a children’s English colouring book showcasing the ABC’s related to the Rule of Law.

We will also be continuing our partnership with the Australian Human Rights Commission and their work on the Human Rights and Technology Discussion Paper. The paper was launched at the end of last year and we strongly encourage everyone to have their say on how we can modernise our human rights protections here.

We look forward to bringing you more updates on all our projects and hope you enjoy this edition of KeyNews.

Regards,
Simon Wilkins

Capital Monitor™
Updates

For 30 years, Capital Monitor has informed subscribers from all walks of life to parliamentary, political, legislative, regulatory and judicial news and information as it happens.

When photocopiers and faxes were considered new technology, Capital Monitor staff would collect press releases or Hansard, and photocopy them for distribution, primarily via courier overnight. Customers from those days fondly recall their day start with sipping on a coffee while unwrapping the CapMon pack of hard copies.

Now delivered within minutes of publishing through email alerts, newsletters and live web pages, fully text-searchable content is indexed in the cloud to the Capital Monitor digital archive for search and retrieval anywhere, anytime, every 90 seconds.

This year, to keep ahead of the curve and continue enhancing subscribers’ overall experience, Capital Monitor is also upgrading its user interface. This upgrade follows an end-to-end systems’ overhaul in play since 2017 that has bridged the gap between content and knowledge from the past with continuous improvement and technology from the present. The upgrade brings consistency across the LexisNexis suite of products, and synchs Capital Monitor’s information monitoring and alerting methodology with best practice industry standards.

Changes include neater visual elements and style, as well as Lexis Advance aligned colours, iconography and font. A consolidated global navigation menu that can be minimised when not in use contains the Alerts Manager and My Products, while all Search tabs are fused under a common drop-down menu to uncover less crowded interface with all the functionality subscribers have come to expect, and more.

New UI updates will start to surface from April 2020. A series of webinars and training sessions are being planned before the system goes live to ensure a smooth and easy transition for all subscribers. Service updates will be shared at each step.

Lexis Advance
Australian Legal Words & Phrases Relaunched

The law is about language. You do not want to use a term incorrectly. Not only is it embarrassing, it could be fatal to your argument.

LexisNexis has recently relaunched the Australian Legal Words and Phrases (ALWP) publication. It is an excellent reference tool that provides a comprehensive listing of words and phrases which have either been defined in legislation or judicially interpreted. ALWP provides details of legislative instruments and cases in which the word or phrase has been defined, with context information about jurisdiction and practice area.

ALWP documents are easily accessed from the QuickFind pod on the Lexis Advance homepage. Simply go to the ‘Defined Terms’ tab and enter a word or phrase you are interested in to get a list of matching terms linking to ALWP or the dictionary product.

From January 2020, ALWP is updated within 48 hours of relevant cases and legislation being added to CaseBase® Case Citator and LawNow Legislation. Cases and legislative instruments are grouped by practice area, making it easier for you to select which reference is more relevant to your matter.

References to cases are provided with case names, parallel citations and CaseBase signals. Users with subscriptions to Unreported Judgments or a law report series on Lexis Advance will be able to access the full text of the case by clicking on the relevant citation.

References to legislation are linked to the most recent version of the relevant instrument in LawNow Legislation, including repealed legislation. Instrument titles are hyperlinked to take you to the instrument homepage. Provision numbers are hyperlinked to take you to the text of the section, regulation or rule in which the term is defined or cross-referenced.

With the automation and relaunch, ALWP now has richer content, more than doubling the number of terms and references available for you to use.

Lexis^® Draft
Updates
Our customers use Lexis Draft to review legal documents in less time, accurately & error-free, making their first draft their final draft. We are committed to improving Lexis Draft to help users get precious time back in their day.

Our team recently released updates to both our Windows desktop version for Word and Outlook and our Office 365 cross-platform version, with a number of minor enhancements focusing on the following:

• Even greater breadth of resolution accuracy for case and legislation citation checks
• Faster document analysis
• Simpler and seamless user experience syncing with Lexis Advance
• Performance improvements in our proofreading and language review tools

We have many exciting enhancements that our team is working towards releasing in 2020. We look forward to seeing how they add even more value to the workflow of our customers.

If you have questions about our 2020 roadmap for Lexis Draft, or would like to participate in customer research, please contact your Relationship Manager.

Visit www.lexisnexis.com.au/drafting today to learn more.

LexisNexis Practical Guidance
Updates

Like to know who our authors are?

The Practical Guidance author model is the 'best of both worlds' in that we find the best legal experts. Some are currently practising and working at firms large and small. Others are working in-house at LexisNexis to curate, augment and ensure currency of content.

And we are delighted that our Practical Guidance Legal Writer team continues to grow! In the past 6 months we have been pleased to welcome:

• Jennifer Bannan, Legal Writer for PG Competition
• Tom Read, Legal Writer for PG Insolvency
• Peter Allsop, Legal Writer for PG Succession
• Mark Bastick, Legal Writer for PG Criminal
• Milena Dajic, Legal Writer for PG Property
• Yoness Blackmore, Legal Writer for Employment

To see the full profiles of our practising specialists and in-house legal writers, please visit https://www.lexisnexis.com.au/en/products-and-services/practical-guidance/meet-the-authors.

Check out our checklists!

Substantial overhaul of Practical Guidance checklists has now been completed, introducing improved formats available for download. These are accompanied by introductory notes to guide and to ensure adherence to best practice in your workflow.

• Action Point Checklists – know you are carrying out all necessary steps in a matter for best practice
• Decision Checklists – when your matter can take one of several paths, determine which one is correct
• Workflow Checklists – ensure you are carrying out processes efficiently by knowing what to do when
• Client Checklists – know what client details you need to capture or provide

Practice area highlights

• PG Competition – new guidance and checklists on mergers about gun-jumping including pre-completion protocols and do’s and don’ts in merger transactions
• PG Corporations – new guidance on managed investments schemes, including new content on passport funds
• PG M&A – new guidance and checklists on electronic signatures and crowd-sourced funding
• PG Cybersecurity, Data Protection & Privacy – coming soon, new topic on digital currency and blockchain, publishing ETA May 2020

Contact your relationship manager for  more information.

Lexis Red^®
Updates

Lexis Red is a digital platform through which you can access your preferred legal content. Through the app you can browse, search, share, and annotate faster than before. Lexis Red is available on iPad, Android tablets, Windows 10 and Macintosh desktops and laptops.

In our recent releases, the team focused on improving the user experience of Lexis Red. These features, enhancements and bug fixes include:

• Bookmarking an intuitive addition to the Lexis Red annotations suite, you can quickly mark a paragraph for future reference;
• ‘Previous’ / ‘Next’ page navigation return to an exact location when using the ‘previous’ and ‘next’ page controls in the content, saving the time you spent scrolling to your last position;
• Automatic updates enhancing the previously manual updates, you can have confidence that your loose-leaf content has the latest author updates;
• Opening hyperlinks greater personalisation via the option to open external hyperlinks within the app or in a browser;
• Search bug fix fixed search bug that prevented all relevant content being captured by the commentary filter.

The next Lexis Red app update is planned for April release.

Additionally, our team is currently working to release new LexisNexis practitioner books on the Lexis Red platform which will be released throughout 2020.

If you would like to learn more about Lexis Red, please contact your Relationship Manager.

Practice Area Updates

Criminal
Commencement of Human Rights Act 2019

QUEENSLAND

As of 1 Jan 2020 the Human Rights Act 2019 fully commenced, representing an important new area of criminal practice in Queensland. Criminal Law Queensland, as of January 2020, now features the new legislation, fully annotated by Queensland barrister Danae Younger, as an exclusive offering for Lexis Advance and Lexis Red.

Civil Procedure
Launch of new uniform civil procedure rules in March 2020

SOUTH AUSTRALIA

The commencement of the new Uniform Civil Court Rules in March 2020 will mark the most significant development in South Australian civil procedure in almost 15 years. The landmark legislation will for the first time introduce uniform rules for the SA Supreme, District and Magistrates Courts, and have been designed by the Rules Committee to coincide and integrate with the launch in the SA courts of electronic filing. Civil Procedure South Australia will of course be updated to incorporate the new Rules, but in addition subscribers will have access to a schedule of updates throughout 2020 whereby the annotations to the existing 2006 civil Rules will be reviewed, updated by our authors and applied as appropriate to the 2020 Rules.

Criminal
New chapter on cartel conduct

FEDERAL

With increasing ACCC interest and activity with respect to unlawful cartel conduct, and criminal charges increasingly being pursued for breach, the launch of a new chapter in Federal Criminal Law is a timely and topical addition of valuable new content for subscribers. The subject is dealt with via a series of chapters of topical commentary written by Justice Payne, as well as extracts of relevant provisions of the Competition and Consumer Act 2010.

Banking and Finance
New author team and substantial content updates in response to high level of legislative activity

FEDERAL

Two new authors, both experts in the field of financial services, have been commissioned for the lead authorship of Financial Services. There has been significant content development in the chapters of advice disclosure, banking and finance, financial products and retail clients and licensing financial service providers. Important legislation developments have also been captured  including the amendments to  the Corporations Regulations Act 2001 which was amended by the Treasury Laws Amendment (AFCA Cooperation) Regulations 2019 and the Treasury Laws Amendment (Protecting Your Superannuation Package) Regulations  2019. The Corporations Act 2001 was also amended by the Treasury Laws Amendment (2019 Measures No 1) Act 2019 and the Treasury Laws Amendment (Design and Distribution Obligations and Product Intervention Powers) Act 2019, which have been captured in the product.

Civil Procedure
New author team commissioned, working on commentary covering newly commenced special referee rule

QUEENSLAND

We are delighted to welcome Justice Bond of the Qld Supreme Court to the author team for Civil Procedure Queensland. Justice Bond is joined by barristers Sophie Gibson and Jaamae Hafeez-Baig and will be responsible for the annotations to the all-important Uniform Civil Procedure Rules 1999. Their first objective will be to annotate the recently commenced Uniform Civil Procedure (Referees) Amendment Rule 2019, aiming for publication in March-April 2020.

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