Hey there,

This is the second Clerkent update.

Since the last v3.0.0 update in July, I have mainly been working on polishing up the user experience and fixing various bugs.Some highlights:

Automatic renaming

Clerkent has always renamed PDFs downloaded by clicking the PDF icon in the search box pop up. Now, it will also rename PDFs that you download directly from certain databases (including Singapore’s eLitigation, OpenLaw, and LawNet).

Support for more databases (e.g. AustLII and NZLII) coming soon.

Copying of case citation on click

I tend to copy and paste case citations a lot, so I thought I’d make it easier. No need to select the entire citation and Ctrl-C, now you can just click the citation and it will be copied to your keyboard (you may have to grant Clerkent permission to write to your keyboard first).

Highlighting of case citations

Clerkent automatically highlights and hyperlinks case citations on many websites. This sometimes caused issues in the past where the citation was already hyperlinked. Now, Clerkent will hyperlink more intelligently — if the citation is already hyperlinked (e.g. as it may be on BAILII), Clerkent will defer to the existing hyperlink and will not re-hyperlink it.

Australian territories websites

As requested, I’ve added hyperlinking support for various Australian territory-specific legal sites.

Jurisdiction flags

Clerkent previously used emojis in the jurisdiction dropdown to represent the flags of the various jurisdictions. This worked fairly well but wasn’t ideal because emojis differ from platform to platform and some jurisdictions did not have an entirely appropriate emoji — I had to use the EU flag (🇪🇺) for ECHR and the globe emoji (🌐) for the ICJ.

Another issue was that Microsoft does not bundle emoji flags, and so anyone viewing a flag emoji on Windows will generally see just the country code, unless they have installed (or the application or website bundles) a font with the relevant flag emoji.

To avoid these issues, Clerkent now bundles SVGs or PNGs of the flags for the various jurisdictions.

Coming soon

(This may already be here when you read this)

One user pointed out that PDFs from AustLII are inappropriate for some use cases, so now Clerkent will attempt to fetch PDFs from the relevant state-specific databases. This is a bit involved because it requires me to add support for each state database. New South Wales and Queensland are coming soon, with more to follow.

That’s all for now.

As always, if you do have any feedback or have encountered any issues, please feel free to let me know.