Why do I need "Query Alert Service"?

Legal practitioners need to keep abreast of the new developments in law for their professional work. However, most of them rely on newspapers or news site that may not include their issues of interest and even if they did include them, they would not provide a link to the court judgment when reporting a story. The "Query Alert Service" allows you to set alerts for any query of your interest and you would get alerts daily on legal documents matching your query.

The service allows you to set your alerts at various relevance levels starting from "Any Match" to "Extremely Relevant" match. So you can manage your daily alerts at a level that you are comfortable with. The alerts generated are also available on the website to view and can be directly added as notes to your legal research thereby significantly improving the efficiency of legal practitioners.

The credit goes to Shamnad Basheer who was the first to bring up the need for such a service on Indian Kanoon. Here is a small demo for using the query alert service:

Please watch the video below on how to use the Query Alert Service

Why do I need "Virtual Legal Assistant"?

Legal research constitutes the backbone of what lawyers do. Many successful lawyers either have research assistant or juniors helping them with organizing, structuring and finally converting their research into documents. Judges similarly have law clerks who organize the research that goes into judgments. The “Legal research Services” tool in Indiankanoon acts as a virtual assistant for legal practitioners. It allows you to annotates cases, takes notes as you read legal documents, allowing you to quickly assemble research on any matter. The research notes can then be pulled into an editor with all the references thereby significantly improving the productivity of legal practitioners. The tight integration between the research and legal documents allows you to move between them without the need to remember where things were stored and where the research notes were made.

Please watch the video explaining the use of the Virtual Legal Assistant:

Why do I need to keep all my research notes?

Very often lawyers find that they have to reinvent the wheel every time they start a new research topic. If instead you have all of your previous research at your fingertips, it will result in saving a lot of time, improving the quality of your legal documents and enable you to move up the value chain of legal work. Most practitioners receive cases which are similar in nature and so the research from older topics are relevant to the newer ones. The legal research service aggregates all your research on any document that can be seamlessly used in a new matter.

What is meant by collaborating on legal research?

It is now more common for legal researchers and practitioners to collaborate with their colleagues in researching a topic. Legal Research Service leverages the power of Internet to radically transform the way we collectively research. Each member can add collaborators with which they can work together on research notes and research drafts. The collaborators can be located anywhere and add the research points at their own time. The members can also make their research available to a wider community of legal researchers while simultaneously benefiting from the research and comments that others have created.

Please watch the video explaining how to collaborate on your legal research:

Will the service help in managing my clients?

Lawyers have difficulty in properly managing facts and legal research related to any client. Often they end up spending significantly more time than expected. The legal research service provides you an unparalleled technological approach to manage your client research. It also provides the time spent on a given matter so that lawyers can bill their clients accordingly.

Should I start research only when I get a new case?

The service provides you the easiest way to keep yourself abreast of all the latest legal developments in an area. By creating topics of interest and constantly updating it with notes from the latest case-laws, you will create yourself an updated database of cases and your comments. Indian Kanoon is an unparalleled service that provides daily updates from Supreme Court, 24 High Courts, Tribunals, Law Commission and Parliamentary debates.

I use multiple devices and constantly on the go. How will I access my research?

By harnessing the power of the Internet, your research database is available to you virtually at all times. You can therefore access all your legal research regardless of where you are located and whether you are using a laptop or a tablet or a mobile phone. This is extremely advantageous if you are on the move, in a court room, or in a different city and need to access all of your legal research for a given topic.

Is Premium Member service free?

No. You can get a free trial of one month but for continued usage, you will have to pay a monthly subscription fee of Rs. 500/- (five hundred only). If you subscribe for a year, then you will only need to pay a discounted sum of Rs. 5000/- (five thousand only).

Is there extra charges for collaborating with my colleagues?

No. The pricing specified above includes all aspects of legal research. You can collaborate with your colleagues using global privacy settings or only on topic you want to.

What will happen if I do not recharge my account?

You can still view and use your old research but you will not able to take any new notes or collaborate with your colleagues.

What is a research dashboard?

The research dashboard allows you to create a new topic or change the currently active topic. It also contains the link to your "Premium Home".

What is "Premium Home"?

"Premium Home" is latest notes/topics of you and your collaborators. You can use those notes in your own research or work on the topics shared by your collaborators.

Here is a video explaining the research dashboard, the timeline of legal research and in managing your own research:

How to select text on mobile browsers?

On mobile browsers, press your finger at the starting point and get the text selection tool. Select your text and just tap the selection or press copy. You will get the dialog box where you can enter the comment and save the selection.

How to change privacy settings for collaboration?

If you look at your settings, your default privacy is set to "Only me". So by default you do not share anything. You can change your global privacy setting to various options like "Collaborators can only read my research", "Collaborators can read and modify my research" etc. Apart from global privacy setting, you can also assign privacy setting for each topic. On a topic page, there is a privacy link to customize.

How accurate is the total time spent on a topic?

It is almost impossible to capture the exact amount of time that a researcher has spent on a topic. It is because the person may be looking at the page but actually not reading it. But we employ a number of heuristics to estimate the idle time and ensure high accuracy in the time-spent metric.

How to create a sub-topic of a given topic?

When you click the link "Start a new topic" on the research dashboard, you would see the option to create a sub-topic or super-topic of any topic in the dashboard. Instead of an independent topic, select one of those options and create the topic.

Some notes or topics do not have modify link. Why?

For topics or notes shared by others, you may not have the permissions to modify it.

Some notes do not have "View" link. Why?

The "View" link for notes takes you to the fragment in the document which you have selected. However, notes that are added from the "search results" page or notes that are not specific to the documents will not have "View" link.

We have tested the functionality on all modern recent browsers like Firefox, Chrome, Safari and Internet Explorer and the research functionality works on all of them. However, taking notes doesn't work on some mobile browsers like UC Browser and Dolphin and we are working to resolve that. If you come across a browser in which you find a problem, please report it to us.

I have a suggestion or found a bug. What to do now?

Please send a mail to [email protected] with subject in the mail starting as FEATURE or BUGS. Also provide full description of the problem together with your environment like device and browser details.