How frequently do you update cases content?

Our cases content is updated every business day (and sometimes on non-business days and weekends too) with an average of 80-100 new unreported judgments being loaded to our system throughout each day – that’s 20,000 to 25,000 new cases each year. Every one of these cases will be read and treated by one of our qualified legal editors, who are adding editorial treatments to cases throughout each working day.

Who are these legal editors, and what are they doing?

In a nutshell: We’re a small, highly qualified team that creates order and useful content from a huge volume of cases.

Our Legal Editors hold legal qualifications (such as LLBs, JDs, Grad Dip in Legal Practice, LLMs) and/or legal professional experience. The team has a vast amount of practical legal experience gained at law firms, government organisations, the courts, and the community legal sector, as well as editorial and research experience from the university sector. All our legal editors have a sound understanding of the Australian court system.

The Australian legal system has 8 state and territory jurisdiction in addition to the federal jurisdiction. Each jurisdiction has a court hierarchy comprised of multiple courts, generalist, and specialist tribunals. Westlaw provides access to the published decisions from the vast majority of these courts and tribunal

And we read them.

Annually our legal editors read 20,000 to 25,000 judgments across Australian jurisdictions. The team adds value and order to the unreported judgments set by applying editorial treatments to cases.

Some of the treatments that you may see are:

• Classification into our comprehensive Key Number system, which groups case law into similar legal concepts to help with your research.
• Identification of litigation history.
• Relationships to cases cited within the judgment – depending on the relationship used, these may also generate KeyCite flags.
• Legislation cited within the judgment.
• Point-of-law digest notes.

Why do some cases get a digest note?

You’ve noticed that some cases get a digest note, but not all of them. Why is that? We’d love to be able to write a digest note for every case that comes our way, but we’re receiving so many judgments each year that we need to be selective. We try to choose the cases where a digest note would be of most value to our customers. Here are some of the reasons our qualified legal editors may choose to write a point-of-law digest for a case:

• Involves a novel question of law, including where it construes a legislative provision for the first time
• has a high media or public profile
• resolves conflicting authorities
• High Court cases
• If a judgment has been reported, particularly in an authorised law report series, we may choose to go back and write a digest note for it – so sometimes you might see further treatment done to a case some time after it first appeared on Westlaw.

When are new Key Numbers/Classifications created?

Part of the Legal Editor's role is to suggest new Key Numbers or changes to the Key Number System to enhance its development and usefulness as they’re reading cases – for example, if they come across something that doesn’t fit neatly into our existing scheme. We review each title at least annually, incorporating suggestions that editors have made to update the scheme in line with new law. Importantly, we create new classifications when we have cases to classify to them, so changes in legislation will typically be reflected in our scheme after we have at least a few relevant cases on that point of law. 

Sometimes we will also do a much deeper dive into a particular title, often re-writing them to reflect changes to legislation, terminology, or an influx of cases on a particular area. 

We also welcome feedback from customers and courts, and have often revised our scheme as a result of customer feedback, or in consultation with the courts. 

How long does it take an unreported judgment to become available on Westlaw?

A few variables affect how long it takes an Australian case to appear on New Westlaw.

First, we’re dependent on the court releasing the judgment to publishers.  The differences between distribution methods and the practices of each court mean that we get some judgments within hours of being delivered in court, whereas some judgments take a bit longer to arrive (days or more).

Further, release of judgment by the court may be delayed due to a publication restriction (sometimes due to an ongoing criminal trial) or while ex tempore reasons are revised before the written decision is published, among other reasons.  We may put a pause on adding some cases to Westlaw if we identify a possible non-publication or suppression issue in our pre-receipting screening.  In those instances, we check with the court whether the judgment text needs to be withdrawn or amended before we publish it.

So then how long does it take from the time we receive it, until you can see it on Westlaw? High Court of Australia and Federal Court of Australia judgments are our priority. For those two courts, the judgment is ordinarily available on New Westlaw within a couple of hours of the judgment being published on the court website. For all other courts, the judgment text for decisions is usually available on New Westlaw either the same day, or within a couple of business days of us receiving the judgment text from the court.