At the 103th German Library Congress in Bremen, the German Association of Law Libraries (AjBD – Arbeitsgemeinschaft für juristisches Bibliotheks- und Dokumentationswesen) had organized a Science Slam on apps from commercial database providers and publishing houses. The participants were: Anton Geist (Lexis Nexis Austria), Bernd Zarbock (juris GmbH), Holger Barth (Springer-Verlag GmbH), Ulrich Reichel (Wolters Kluwer) and Bertam Salzmann (UTB GmbH/Nomos)
The “LexisNexis ® News Monitor” is a personal news service. Processed by an expert editorial team the users get currently law news on their smart phone, tablet or PC. The articles are short and concise. A direct link leads to the full text of the cited decisions or legislation. Registered users can select news from 33 areas of Austrian law. With the “KODEX-App” users can download the appropriate volume of a KODEX (Austrian statutes) just with the code contained in the print version. All licensees of LexisNexis Austria can use the LexisNexis® Online App. Authorized users get mobile access to all archives of their subscribed journals and to the content of the database.
The “juris Nachrichten App” (juris News App) provides free and current law news from all areas of law. With the law subject filter you can set up the juris News App on your personal needs. The “juris DAV App” is free of charge and without registration. It is suitable for smartphones and tablets and for Android and Apple iOS available. It contains800important lawsand regulationsof the German federal government inthecurrently validversions. In addition, theappoffersa virtual handfile. User can saveretrieved dataon their smartphoneand use offline.It is supportedwith a comfortablefull-textsearch function.
SpringerLink is a publication database containing articles and chapters from over 2,500 peer-reviewed journals and over tens of thousands of books – in total, over 6 million documents spanning every area of science (including law), technology and medicine. The Features of the “SpringerLink App” are a keyword search, document details (including abstracts), full-text view (only available to subscribers), list of articles/chapters that match to the search, to refine search by advanced search criteria and a save modus for search results
The JURION (Wolters Kluwer) “E-Akte/e-file” allows access to all personal documents and case law designed in your firm, agency or department at any time. Users can link internal and external sources (own local content, including laws, judgments, comments, forms, articles and selected web content) in a combined search. It opens up all the know-how of a law firm, including OCR and flexible rights management (with the extension JURION knowledge management).
The “NOMOSAPP” is a systematic and individual learning module with versatile search functions and other functionalities.Definitions come from the Nomos textbooks written by university professors and other academics. For each definition, the relevant legislation is offered. The personal learning progress can be assessed by the statistic function.
Apps are very useful for legal research and to get current news. There are applicable anywhere and easy to use. But please note that apps usually send a user’s personal data elsewhere for processing. Get clear about where this is and who will be in control of the transferred data. What about law apps in your country?
Ivo Vogel