Nearly 50,000 court judgments in the jurisdiction of England and Wales will shortly become freely available online.

The Law Society Gazette of England and Wales reports that the service, hosted by the British National Archives, will go live next April when the British Ministry of Justice’s contract with the British and Irish Legal Information Institute (BAILII) expires.

The new service will create a comprehensive online archive of ‘judgments as data’, encoded in a form readable by computer. 

The data will also be scannable by artificial-intelligence-based legal support tools, as well as researchers and academic lawyers.

“We’ll meet the deadline, there’s no doubt,” John Sheridan (digital director at the National Archives) told the Gazette, adding that 47,366 judgments had already been encoded in ‘Legal Document Mark-up Language’ (Legal XML).

Decisions of senior courts

Decisions of the senior courts from 2003 will be the first batch of judgments to be published.

These were passed on by BAILII in the form of rich-text and pdf documents.

“We can proceed with a high degree of confidence on the basis that they are Crown copyright and archived, with the active engagement of the judiciary,” Sheridan said.

Questions remain about the addition of judgments from junior courts and tribunals – currently a gap in BAILII’s service.

“April will be, by no means, the end – rather the beginning,” Sheridan concluded.