The FCL&Co Case Law Search App was recently featured in the Asian Law Business (April 2016 Edition) in the article “Welcome to the future – Technology is changing the way that lawyers work, and a number of Asiabased startups are leading the way” by Sergio Held.
An extract of the article can be seen here where we were quoted:-
In Malaysia, Foong Cheng Leong, founder and partner of a Kuala Lumpur-based law firm, is developing a free case law search app to help lawyers gain access to a large database of court judgments. “Our courts publish judgments online, but these judgments are published by the court websites of each respective state. For example, the Kuala Lumpur Court website publishes their own judgments while the Sabah and Sarawak courts publish on their own. There is no centralised search engine and the search is only for case names and not their contents,” says Foong. “I then created a Google custom search to crawl all these websites, but some courts decided to block Google from crawling and have occasionally removed published judgments whenever they upgraded their systems.”
Foong has been gathering judgments since 2008. The Malaysian government rejected an application for funds to develop and feed the app, but a team of four people is now uploading judgments. In less than three months, Foong’s team has uploaded about 4,000 cases. When they reach 10,000 cases, Foong will launch the free app. Each case has to be read and searchable keywords have to be entered.
“Some form of legal skill is required to identify the main issues,” he says.
NEED FOR SPEED
Technology is also changing the behaviour of lawyers and the way they interact with clients. “In the old days, lawyers would take a longer time to churn out documents or deal with clients. But with technology now, we could easily manage a few cases at the same time,” Foong says. “Our actions per minute can [improve] significantly. For example, I could be drafting an affidavit on my mobile phone while waiting for case to be called in court or answering clients’ queries via WhatsApp.”
Read the full article here.
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