The J-Link web browser add-on is a simple research tool for users of the JustCite legal citation database. J-Link’s single button lets you search for legal references on any given web page or intranet and then link back to matching legal references. Related legal content can be journal articles, transcripts and legislation related to court and case reports held on JustCite.

Justis Publishing, the owner of J-Link and JustCite, has a heritage of independently publishing electronic legal information online and on CD-ROMs. JustCite operates with UK parliamentary information and EU procurement legislation as well as wider EU member state legislation. With information on over 315,000 cases, JustCite acts as a gateway to other legal sources such as Westlaw, LexisNexis and Informa.

Justis hopes that the simplicity of the J-Link tool will make for quicker and more efficient searches of legal references online. The simplicity is also geared to enable fee-earners in legal practices to do their own simple web searches, thereby freeing up the time of a firm’s information professionals for more detailed research tasks.

With a case report potentially containing hundreds of references, a significant amount of time can be saved that would otherwise be spent laboriously searching for case files and related legal documentation.

As a free application, J-Link simply requires registration; it then adds a button to your browser toolbar. A free trial with limited data access to the JustCite database is also available for first-time users. This will give a flavour of the site, as well as put into context what is on offer with a subscription.

Once you access a web page, you just highlight any patch of text on a site and ­ providing the appropriate legal references are there ­ press the J-Link button. J-Link then moves seamlessly back to JustCite, grabbing the details you have highlighted for the main database.

The only apparent weakness with J-Link lies with the great variation in how content providers write abbreviations. The spacing between references is variable, as is letter case; on occasion words can be misspelled altogether, and legal references can be written in dozens of ways. To keep a lid on the problem, Justis employs a colloquial-terms database and manually enters any additions it finds or that users come across.

Justis has adopted a simple, no frills approach to this JustCite tool. J-Link works well, and sometimes that is all a user needs to know.