News
MarkLogic helps UK National Archives democratise access to court data
November 2022 by Marc Jacob
MarkLogic Corporation, a leader in complex data and metadata management and portfolio company of Vector Capital, today announced that its unified data platform is underpinning the UK Government’s drive to turn court judgements into data for analysis in order to improve transparency in the justice system.
The National Archives, the UK Government’s official archive and publisher, launched its new service, Find Case Law based on the MarkLogic data platform, in April 2022. The National Archives seeks to replicate, in court judgements and tribunal decisions, the search ability and data analysis already possible in their other MarkLogic-powered solutions at legislation.gov.uk.
The initiative required a database that would store court documents as data. MarkLogic has a strong track record with legal information systems and was a trusted partner. Using Marklogic helped the team get the service up and running quickly. The MarkLogic platform allows The National Archives to use a content structure that provides advanced search capabilities.
“This is data for public use and benefit. We are enabling greater transparency of the justice system and securing important records for the nation” said John Sheridan, digital director of The National Archives. “Because so many of the world’s legal systems are based on the English system, we expect this project to have a wide reach and influence.”
The first stage of the Find Case Law service enables searching an entire court judgment or a focused search on key areas such as party names, dates, and courts. Eventually, The National Archives would like to use the power of MarkLogic to store a rich graph of links between cases and past decisions to enable rapid access to related data and create more informed search and targeted analysis.
“MarkLogic is thrilled to have our technology underpinning such an important goal— transparency of the justice system,” said Jeff Casale, CEO of MarkLogic.
Paid services have long enabled search of court records, but The National Archives have delivered on the UK Government’s decision that access should be free and accessible to all citizens governed by the justice system. Court judgments are being preserved by the archive. Anyone can access the data via Find Case Law and those looking to perform more advanced search and analysis can get a license to use the data.
The service includes more than 50,000 documents, 1600 of which have been published since April.
