Good to hear that Vizlegal is making progress in its ambitious bid to create a global repository of indexed and structured legal judgments and filings, with UK Upper Tribunal (Tax & Chancery) decisions now converted from PDFs to searchable and easy-to-read HTML.
Unlike in the United States, where the likes of Lex Machina is making great strides in applying legal analytics to centrally stored and widely available legal decisions, in the UK and Ireland, judgments and statutes are disparately stored and can be difficult to access and track.
The recent Upper Tribunal decisions supplements Vizlegal’s other recent sources:
• UK First-Tier Tribunal (Tax) decisions since inception
• Ireland Tax Appeals Commission decisions since inception
• Ireland Information Commissioner decisions since inception
• European Court of Human Rights decisions since inception
Right now Vizlegal, which in 2016 secured €30,000 at NDRC’s Investor Day sponsored by Bank of Ireland, is working on allowing Irish practitioners to track Circuit Court Diaries and says it is open to suggestions on what to work on next. NDRC invests in early stage start ups and its Investor Day involves startups pitching, Dragons Den style, to a panel of investors.
In their latest blog post, which is worth a read, Vizlegal co-founder and CEO Gavin Sheridan asks if too much attention in legal tech is focussed on sexy subjects like machine intelligence and not enough on the ‘boring’ plumbing of legal information. His conclusion: Yes – we need to look at things from first principles and examine the basic infrastructure of law! You can read that blog here: https://blog.vizlegal.com/the-plumbing-and-pipes-of-law-886467d2aa49