Hey there

Since v3.4.1, released in September, there have been a number of fixes for various issues relating to search, downloading, and renaming. I identify most of these issues through my own daily use of Clerkent, but obviously I do not and cannot use all the features all the time — if you do spot any issues that haven’t been fixed, do let me know.

Automatic renaming

As you may have noticed, Clerkent renames PDFs downloaded from certain case law websites, including:

• Australia: AustLII
• UK: WestLaw
• Canada: CanLII
• Singapore: eLitigation, OpenLaw, and LawNet

Singapore users may also be interested to know that Clerkent renames PDFs downloaded from Singapore Statues Online (sso.agc.gov.sg) too, which is useful because SSO truncates file names to 50 characters; inconvenient for legislation with lengthy titles.

Canonical judgment PDFs for Australia

Although AustLII is pretty comprehensive, the PDF judgments it provides come with the AustLII watermark, which is not ideal for certain use cases. Clerkent therefore attempts to fetch PDFs for Australian judgments directly from the state or territory-specific case law database. There are quite a number of these databases, so support is not comprehensive, but cases found in the following databases should be downloadable directly from those databases without the AustLII watermark at the moment:

• Queensland: Queensland Judgments and Queensland Supreme Court Library
• Victoria: Victoria Law Library
• New South Wales: NSW Case Law

I intend to continue to add more state and territory databases over time, but if there are any you would like me to prioritise, feel free to let me know.

Additional database support

I continuously add support for more case law databases. Since September, I’ve added the following:

• Singapore: State Court, Family Court, and Juvenile Court judgments from the last 3 months should now show up. Older judgments may or may not show up, depending on whether they can be found on CommonLII. It’s a shame there’s no comprehensive open access database for these lower court judgments.
• Australia: as mentioned above, judgments found on Queensland Judgments, Queensland Supreme Court Library, Victoria Law Library, and NSW Case Law should now show up with search, but I think from a practical standpoint coverage has hardly changed because AustLII was already pretty comprehensive.
• UK: I plan to add the National Archives’ Find Case Law database, which is intended to be the primary open access judgment database in the UK. However, at the moment, the search function does not appear to work well (it has trouble returning accurate results even for exact case citations). I’ll add it when the search function becomes more usable or if BAILII ceases to operate.

Future developments

I have no plans to add any major new features in the immediate future, but I will continue to address any bugs and usability annoyances that I become aware of.

If you have any suggestions for new features or would like to flag any issues to me, please feel free to let me know.