As the legal profession continues to evolve post-pandemic, many practitioners have become very comfortable with general business technology like Teams, Zoom and Slack, as well as specialist legal technology (“legaltech”).
Technology can really help to minimise those “unbillable hours” by avoiding travel time and repetitive tasks, for example, in preparing contracts or letters of advice.
Until very recently, however, legaltech tools have not been available to help with the foundational task of finding and interpreting the black letter law, associated regulations and guidance notes.
Whilst the Commonwealth of Australia’s Federal Register of Legislation is the authorised, whole-of-government website for federal legislation and related documents, the user experience is rudimentary. This is because the register has been designed for you to read the legislation – and that’s all. Essentially, it’s just a clunky online version of the printed word with some very rudimentary search, sort and filter functions.
The Australian Legal Information Institute (AustLII) offers a marginally better online experience but it’s a static rather than a dynamic source.
And neither of these sources has been designed for you to research, interpret and cross-reference the law and related regulations in the new world of remote and flexible work where you need access to information anywhere, any time and on any device including your mobile phone.
In other words, they are not designed to support you as a lawyer to access the foundational information you need anywhere, anytime, including on any device (possibly even in a language other than English). Nor are these sites built with web content accessibility features to support access by persons with disabilities such as vision impairments or limited motor skills.
As a result we know many lawyers who still resort to printing off hard copies and going old school with highlighters and sticky notes!
If you are committed to working digitally, your alternative is to open multiple browser tabs at the same time and toggle back and forth, probably taking manual notes as you go.
Imagine if everything you needed was only one-click away?
That’s the promise of RegulationCity for Australian financial services legislation and regulations.
The site is a one-stop digital destination for the Corporations Act and the regulations and guidance notes of all the major federal regulators, including: ASIC, APRA, AUSTRAC, ACCC, RBA and OAIC.
Plus every regulation is automatically linked to essential related content – it’s literally only one-click away – and you can search for terms in context.
RegulationCity is available on subscription and delivers one-click access to 30,000+ pages of content in a beautiful rich web environment enabled with advanced search, bookmarking and easy navigation features.
It’s powered by unique virtual documents technology developed by 1WordFlow that spins up a digital twin from the underlying source.
Valuable time and resources are wasted every day finding and downloading regulatory documents. The main problem is that you can’t just quickly dip into a PDF or Word document – you have to download the whole thing and then scroll and search.
The time saving benefits of RegulationCity are estimated to be 350 hours per person per year because you can forget about toggling, scrolling, downloading and managing multiple PDF and Word files.
You can also forget about printing, highlighting and sticky notes!
Experience the difference RegulationCity can make to your legal practice by signing up for a free 30 day trial.