SCC Casefinder

Supreme Court Casefinder
Full Text Premium Edition Review​

I was lucky enough to get an opportunity of using this insanely priced piece of software for quite some time. Of course, lawyers and legal researchers need no introduction to Supreme Court Cases, a journal which has been reporting judgments by the Supreme Court of India since 1969. This software features the full text of Supreme Court judgments from 1950 till date.

Package and Installation

The Premium package includes a set of four cdroms and a hardware activation key. Case Finder employs Aladdin system's HASP hardware activation key which has to be connected either to the parallel port or USB port of your computer to use the software. The installation is simple on the whole and provides the user with a choice of minimal, fast access and full installation options.

Full installation eliminates any 'CD juggling' during use. While the official recommended specs state vaguely a Pentium processor and 32 MB RAM, I'd personally recommend a 1 GHz processor and 256MB RAM thanks to its XP style menus and simultaneous multiple database searches. It works only on Windows 98/ME/NT4/2000/XP and requires a minimum of 400MB space for typical installation and 2.5GB space for full installation.

Usage

The program has a medium learning curve for anyone familiar with basic computing and word processors but has enough meat for a advanced use. A basic tour and advanced tour is provided to familiarize the user with the program along with a pretty good inbuilt Help section.

The major areas covered by the software as separate databases are:

  1. Articles published in journal section of the SCC print edition.
  2. Case notes (summaries).
  3. Central Statutes.
  4. Definitions of common words and phrases.
  5. Full text of judgments of the Supreme Court of India.
  6. Rules and orders.
  7. Treaties and conventions.

Judgments can be browsed through the following ways:

  1. Alphabetical citation index.
  2. Statute and topic wise index.
  3. Citation search.

Statutes, Rules, Treaties and Definitions can be located via separate alphabetical indexes of their own.

A powerful free-text search is implemented for words or phrase search within these databases. The advanced mode of the free-text search is a pleasure to use. Because of its great flexibility it allows a power user to tailor his search for desired results with features like

  1. Ability to limit the databases searched.
  2. Set an year range.
  3. Change proximity of keywords in the result using NEAR operator.
  4. application of complex search like NOT, AND, phrase lookup etc.

Case Finder is also provided with ability to search within results which helps in narrowing down the results. For instance, if too wide a net is cast, the software is able to display only 999 search results per database but it stores all the results for 'search within results' function. The choice then is either to perform as fresh search with different keywords or to refine the results by searching within the results (displayed results as well as non-displayed results).

The Ugly Side

The program allows user to print a judgment text. But it strictly discourages copy-pasting of even a single judgment, by restricting the number of characters that can be copied to the clipboard at a time. For instance to transfer a judgement to an MS Office document, the user has to perform several small copy-paste operations. A single 'select all' command will pop up an unfriendly message, "The selected text is too large to be copied. Please make a smaller selection and try again." This make it practically impossible to copy-paste a judgment to an MS Word file for instance.

By smaller selection, the message means one page at a time. To add insult to injury, there is no 'physical' page-separation or page-break as such; only an inconspicuous end of page symbol, inline with a continuous text, so the user will almost always end up overshooting the page limit while drag-selecting text to copy. That means try to copy again slowly, a word at a time and take care you don't exceed the copying limit brainwave. To call this annoying would perhaps be an understatement. Head notes and keywords of the judgement cannot be copied at all.

The latest versions have even managed to make GNU Ghostscript based virtual PDF printers non-functional with the software.

What's more, imagine a software costing excess of Rs.50,000, that one fine morning simply refuses to work because you, the user decided not to purchase yearly upgrades. Perhaps it was the fact that bulk of its users are lawyers and law professionals that made the publisher's 'fix' this issue in subsequent release! The only reason I'm telling this is to give the reader an idea of the publisher's obsession with intellectual property rights, which though understandable, has gone a bit too far in this case.

Conclusion

A single user license includes database updates for one year. A Standard Edition priced nearly Rs.20,000 less than the Premium Edition is also available. The most notable features missing in this edition include inability to search all the databases simultaneously, no journal articles and full-text of post-1969 judgments only (instead of post-1950). One may also opt for a DVD version of the Premium Edition while the Standard Edition is available only on CD.

Subsequent updates can be subscribed for Rs.9000 p.a. Database are updated by applying Interim updates downloadable from publisher's website or on cdroms delivered to the user. Latest judgments, as fresh as ones delivered two to three days earlier, can be viewed and printed by connecting directly to the publisher's website through the inbuilt 'latest cases from website' feature.

With highly intrusive anti-piracy mechanisms, the developers seem to be more focused on protecting their intellectual property rights rather than the ease of use for a genuine end-user. It is ironical that despite these anti-piracy brainwaves, the publisher's competitors managed to copy its software, as the publisher claimed in a barrage of copyright infringement lawsuits while a licensed user remains handicapped.

If this is the disdain with which EBC treat a registered user, I might as well purchase a Rs.500 pirated copy of the software from pavements, HASP hardlock dongle and all notwithstanding, rather than creating a hole in my pocket and then being treated like a thief. If you can live with the restrictions and the high initial cost and updating cost,this software has the potential of being a big aid in legal research.

Contact info:

Eastern Book Company Pvt. Ltd
34,Lalbagh,Lucknow-226001
Ph. (0522) 274901, 223171, 226517; Fax:91-522-224328

5-B, Atma Ram House, 1, Tolstoy Marg,
Connaught Place, New Delhi -1.
Ph. 23752320/21/22/23; Telefax: (011) 23752320.

Price: Premium Edition: Rs.72,000 + VAT Standard Edition: Rs.54,000 + VAT.

Official Webpage of SCC Casefinder
 
Click to expand...
Back
Top