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SWANS, the consolidated statutes of Western Australia


SWANS, the consolidated statutes of Western Australia, is updated weekly by
the Parliamentary Counsels' office. As well as being available within the
Department, dial-up access to SWANS is available to private and government
users at $1.95 per minute through State Print. A separate copy of the database
is maintained on the Judicial Support System.


WA Supreme Court Decisions


A database of decisions of the Supreme Court has been created. All the
decisions produced since computers have been used in the Court are being
loaded into TITAN to produce a database for the use of members of the Court.
Access by the legal profession is being investigated. The Supreme Court judges
and Masters resolved in December 1990 to preface their reasons for judgment
with catchwords which follow Australian Digest headings (as recommended by the
AIJA: Olsson (1992)). Stress is placed on each judge's responsibility to
provide good catchwords, so as to ensure effective retrieval.


Litigation support component


The judicial network also provides access to transcript retrieval (see WA
Crown Law (1991) for details). Transcript is provided to the Judicial Support
System by Spark and Cannon, transcript contractors, in a form which is
suitable to be loaded into Titan. The litigation support system developed
using Titan automatically produces Witness lists and Exhibit lists. The
generation of issues lists linked to the relevant portions of the transcript
is already available and is being enhanced with hierarchical issues lists. It
will soon produce an index of witnesses indicating all page numbers, Exhibits
and MFIs associated with that witness. The Windows environment allows users to
'cut and paste' from transcript or lists into word processing documents.

Where a trial is specified as requiring litigation support, the transcript
contractors provide transcript in computerised form to the judicial network
operators on a daily basis, for loading into the Titan system. An important
element in the successful development of the system was the specification of
changes to the preparation of transcript necessary to allow it to be retrieved
effectively by Titan, covering five matters: witness names; names of judge and
counsel; page header; page footer; and references to Exhibits and MFIs (WA
Crown Law (1991), Addendum).


Role of the Crown Law Department


An important element in developments in Western Australia is how the Crown Law
Department, and its consultants, have worked with a number of other agencies
involved in matters which may lead to complex criminal prosecutions, in such a
way that a very consistent pattern of technology use has developed. The
Rothwells Task Force is using Titan for retrieval of both transcript and
document summaries. The Australian Securities Commission is co-operating with
the Task Force concerning a trial which commenced in July 1992 to
test the integration of image capture of documents with text
retrieval of both transcript and document

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