Legal Research

Legal publishers start to join the RSS train

By scott

They may be coming late to the party, but at long last the legal publishers are starting to add RSS delivery options to their content. The last few months has seen Westlaw UK, Lawtel, PLC and Justis all add feeds.

This is good news, and great news if you sign on through individual passwords. It can be more of an issue if you’re using single sign-on/IP recognition etc, where in some instances you may not be able to set up individual saved searches etc.

It should also be noted that a subscription to the individual services is required to access the content.

Lawtel

Lawtel UK daily update http://www.lawtel.com/rss/ukdailyupdate.xml

Data Sets
Case Law - http://www.lawtel.com/rss/caselaw.xml
Legislation - http://www.lawtel.com/rss/legislation.xml
Articles - http://www.lawtel.com/rss/articles.xml
News and Press - http://www.lawtel.com/rss/newspress.xml
Busy Solicitors Digest - http://www.lawtel.com/rss/bsd.xml

Subject Feeds
Human Rights - http://www.lawtel.com/rss/humanrights.xml
Personal Injury - http://www.lawtel.com/rss/personalinjury.xml
Civil Procedure - http://www.lawtel.com/rss/civilprocedure.xml
Employment - http://www.lawtel.com/rss/employment.xml
European Union - http://www.lawtel.com/rss/europeanunion.xml
Local Government - http://www.lawtel.com/rss/localgovernment.xml
Property - http://www.lawtel.com/rss/property.xml

You can also create RSS feeds from search results / saved searches.

Westlaw UK

You can create RSS feeds from search results / saved searches, or set up feeds from a full text journal or case report series. Westlaw allows you to enter a Client ID against alerts, and also add IP authentication to an RSS Feed by entering your sponsor code.

PLC
Practical Law Company (PLC) have recently started rolling out RSS feeds for some of their content/practice areas (listed below), but as yet do not - at least for me - seem to have rolled out the option to create RSS feeds from search results / saved searches. Their current feeds are as follows:

PLC Corporate: - http://corporate.practicallaw.com/rss.do
PLC Employment: - http://employment.practicallaw.com/rss.do
PLC Finance: - http://finance.practicallaw.com/rss.do
PLC Financial Services: - http://fs.practicallaw.com/rss.do
PLC IPIT & Communications: - http://ipandit.practicallaw.com/rss.do
PLC Share Schemes & Incentives: - http://incentives.practicallaw.com/rss.do
PLC Tax: - http://tax.practicallaw.com/rss.do

Justis

They provide some example feeds such as:

Latest cases from The Weekly Law Reports: - http://www.justis.com/titles/justis-wlr.xml

You can also create RSS feeds from search results / saved searches

In the case of Justis - as least with regards to RSS feeds from search results / saved searches - the output is not very good, as it displays only by relevance and not by date. So, for example, I ran a search on ‘broadcasting’. Now whilst you can sort the search results by relevance/date etc; when saving the RSS it only saves the output as a relevance feed. Whilst this may be of use to some people, it is of little use to me, as part of the reason for saving a search is to get alerted to NEW material - My example feed is full of items from the Radio Authority - long since replaced by Ofcom.

I contacted Justis about this, and they confirmed that their developers were aware of the issue and wanted to change it to offer date relevance, but that the way their data is currently structured made this difficult at the current time.

Full post as published by Information Overload on December 08, 2008 (boomark / email).