Legal Research Rescue

Find your case on AustLII first time, every time.

March 1, 2009

I love AustLII (yes, that is the nerdiest sentence you’ll read this year). It is an invaluable depository of free Australian legal material which has saved many a time-poor law student from being forced to navigate some of the busier databases out there. But I didn’t always love it. In fact, I pretty much steered well clear of it’s text-heavy interface for the same reason that many lawyers and researchers still do – too many pages (and paaages…) of irrelevant results. The good news is that it really only takes one very simple step to start using AustLII effectively. 

Sick of piles of results when searching AustLII? There's a better way!

The reason you get sooooo many results on AustLII – all v any

Anyone who uses Google or any of the major Australian legal databases will be familiar with the idea of adding search terms to limit results. The more search terms, the more focussed and less numerous the results. Multiple search terms means you want to look for results with “all of these words” right? Well, usually…

Apart from the fact that AustLII is a full text database (unlike Casebase, FirstPoint and LawCite), the reason this is the case is because most search engines assume that you would like to put the boolean operator “and” between your results. So, it would not be too silly to search for expert evidence and expect to turn up results that contain both expert and evidence somewhere in the document. Indeed, that’s how most search engines tend to work, it would seem. Most, but not all – the Powers That Be at AustLII decided that AustLII should be different. Maybe one of the PTB was a middle child. 

The main search box on the front page of AustLII assumes you want to search for “any of these words“. So, if you put expert evidence into the search box, AustLII is going to give you any document that has the word expert or the word evidence in it somewhere. If you tried to “limit” your results by adding a further search term, say checklist, then your results would include any document that mentioned the term expert, or the term evidence, or the term checklist. It soon becomes easy to see why seemingly specific searches across AustLII return so many results that don’t appear to be on topic.

The second reason for the vast number of results is that AustLII has a a whole lot of info to search across – cases, legislation, articles and more. The search box on AustLII’s front page assumes that you want to search across them all. Ew. Any mention of expert, evidence or checklist across any Act, Regulation, judgment, article – that’s a whole lot of reading to do.

How to fix it in one easy step

It’s probably easy to see (now) how to get around the first of AustLII’s default settings discussed above – you can use the boolean operator and in between your search terms. For example, expert and evidence and checklist should limit your results compared to the original example. 

As an easy workaround for both of the issues identified, use the Advanced Search as a rule – it’s a link just under the main search box and contains a wealth of untold, uh, options. Which are almost as good as riches when you’re searching for a case that you need yesterday. Here you can limit your results to cases (or articles etc) or go further to cases within a particular jurisdiction and/or court or tribunal. Used in conjunction with AustLII’s boolean operators (listed below), you should be able to find your case first time, every time.

AustLII search connectors

From the AustLII user guide

Operator	Meaning	Example
and	page contains both terms	negligen* and defam*
or	page contains either of two terms	weapon or gun or firearm or pistol
not	page contains 1st term but not 2nd	trust not family
near	1st term is within 50 words of 2nd	disclos* near offence
w/n or /n/	1st term is within n words of 2nd	court w/5 jurisdiction
pre/n	1st term must precede 2nd term by less thann words	contempt pre/3 court
( )	Always use parentheses if search includes two types of connectors	contempt near (radio or television)
n *	Use * for truncation	‘negligen*’ finds negligent, negligence, negligently etc
	Regular plurals, and singulars, are searched automatically	‘firearm’ = ‘firearms’ and vice-versa

A few words of caution about using AustLII for legislation

You might note that this article is about finding cases on AustLII. I know many people use AustLII for legislation, but I don’t generally recommend it for this use. I’m not bagging out AustLII just for the hell of it – for a free resource it is world class and I use its case law and secondary materials constantly. I am hesitant because I am aware of a at least one instance where lawyers have relied upon out-of-date legislation on AustLII for an advice that was circulated externally; needless to say it didn’t reflect well on the people involved.

AustLII itself makes users aware that there is a lag between legislation being introduced and the legislation being uploaded to AustLII’s database. More importantly, how often existing legislation is updated to reflect amendments is anyone’s guess. The point to remember is that AustLII takes material from external sources (courts, parliament, etc) and process that material to appear in its own database. While this is usually fine for static information such as cases and articles, dynamic information such as ever-changing legislation should be sourced from the most authoritative place available.

In case you’re interested (and I won’t be offended if you’re not, I do realise this is quite a geeky thing to get hung up on!), I use Lawlex (which will send you out to the correct government site for each of the Australian jurisdictions) so that I don’t have to remember ComLaw for Commonwealth legislation, PCO for NSW legislation, etc.

In short: 

• Use the Advanced Search in AustLII to avoid searching for any of your results across all cases, legislation, articles etc
• Use the authoritative source for legislation, not AustLII.

Do you have any other tips or tricks when it comes to using AustLII? Please share! Leave a comment, find me on twitter [@laurenaustinLRR] or share a link on delicious [legalresearchrescue].

Filed under: Case law, Internet research

Tags: australia, cases, databases, law, search