In depth: National Archives to expand judgment publications service

Earlier this year, an unusual email exchange took place between the Court of Appeal Criminal Division and the National Archives. An editor at the archives’ Find Case Law judgment-publishing service needed to check if an individual in a ruling concerning modern slavery should be identified. The court went back to the parties for submissions and confirmed that no order for anonymity should be made, stating ‘it is a central principle of criminal justice that criminal proceedings should take place in public’.

National Archives cites R v Tunc Ahmet as an example of how Find Case Law has become part of the scene of England and Wales since going live in April 2022 (the system is still officially in beta mode). ‘We’re getting knitted into the infrastructure,’ the archives’ digital director John Sheridan told the Gazette.

The case also illustrates one of the challenges of publishing new court judgments, which need more ongoing editorial attention than much of National Archives’ collection. The editing team at Find Case Law has grown from three to seven since launch – still a modest headcount considering the volume of material. The service currently holds 63,000 judgments.

Several more challenges lie ahead as the service works towards its goals of providing access to judgments, preserving them and – most problematic – enabling the onward reuse of their contents.

The project’s next phase is an expansion of coverage from the senior courts of England and Wales plus the UK Supreme Court (the inclusion of Scottish courts seems to be parked in the ‘too difficult’ box).

The first target is to include more county court judgments, starting with those which judges consider significant. ‘We only expect to see a handful of cases, it’s very much judiciary-led,’ Sheridan said. Tribunals are another focus, though the Employment Tribunal will be well down the queue as its judgments are already made available.

'We don’t see it as our role to privilege one case over another'

 John Sheridan, National Archives

Magistrates’ courts pose a special set of problems – today the bench is largely unreported unless a local newspaper reporter, an increasingly dying breed, happens to turn up. ‘Maybe one day,’ Sheridan said. ‘We’ve got our work cut out for the next couple of years.’

Meanwhile, Find Case Law’s home page will be revamped over the next few months, though the often criticised listing in chronological order will continue. ‘We don’t see it as our role to privilege one case over another,’ Sheridan said. However, he points out it is simple to search by court. And ‘push notifications’ from specified areas of interest will follow at a later stage.

A more controversial aspect of Find Case Law is enabling the reuse of court judgments by opening up the data they contain to computer analysis. This is simplified by the fact that each judgment’s key elements are tagged in Legal Document Markup Language, an international open source schema.

Lawtech ventures are sniffing out a potentially lucrative market for AI systems trained on judgment data. Outcome prediction, of course, is the holy grail – and one that sends a shiver down the spine of many judges. Access to Find Case Law data is controlled by licensing conditions: the standard free Open Justice Licence does not permit computational analysis: even feeding a judgment into a system such as ChatGPT is out of bounds.

‘Programmatic searching in bulk’ to ‘identify, extract or enrich contents’ must be done under the Computational Analysis Licence, as the previous Transactional Licence is now styled. This is still free, but applicants must set out what they plan to do with the data.

In reviewing applications, National Archives considers whether the purpose of the reuse ‘is likely to jeopardise the proper administration of justice’. So far, 25 such licences have been granted. How many refused? None so far, Sheridan said, though several have had to revise unsatisfactory initial applications. What proposed use would get a definite no? ‘Processing judgments to compile a dataset for naming and shaming on social media,’ Sheridan suggested.

And who is using Find Case Law? The service gets between 40,000 and 50,000 page views a month. Many seem also to be users of the service’s partner, the statute law database. There are also spikes when a celebrity case is in the news, with many viewers clicking through from X or other social media. Half of all judgment views are on mobile devices. And early search analysis suggests many are litigants in person, ‘looking for a case like mine’.

This is where expanding the reach could be important: despite the protestations of many litigants in person, a ‘case like mine’ is more likely to be in the county than the Supreme Court. 

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