Bombay Cases Infotech, publishers of Bombay Cases Reporter, offer their new and improved suite of law research database tools, BCI-Search and MLA (Maharashtra Local Acts). The two are separate products, each with its own installation. They are not offered as a single composite package. Our review covers the most recent release (December 2007) of both products.

The Supreme Court Search is actually a third stand-alone product. The BCI Search features Bombay High Court decisions and those of the Supreme Court that have come up from Bombay. The rest of this review covers only the BCI (Bombay decisions) and Maharashtra Local Acts products.

Installation

Installation of both applications is relatively straightforward. For some odd reason (probably a missing or badly configured autorun.inf file), the installers don’t launch on insertion of the CD, and you have to find the install file and run it. Thankfully, instructions are provided on the back of the CD covers. There’s a password screen (incomprehensible, given that each program demands a post-installation registration key) to trigger the install, and after that the installer does its thing. There are some unnerving messages towards the end, including two utterly bizarre ones that ask if you want to load DCom for Windows 98 and DCOM for Windows 95 … Windows 98? Windows 95? In an age when XP is being forced out by Vista, who still uses Win98 and Win95? Malhotra at BCI says that they have a lot of users on both platforms. I wish they’d find some way to detect the OS and bypass these silly screens.

But the messages are all bark and no bite, all harmless. You just grit your teeth and suffer through the ugly warning boxes.

By default, both programs copy the entire database to the hard drive. This makes for significant performance gains when running the programs.

User Interface

If you’re a diehard SCC Online fan, the BCI interface is probably a disappointment at first. But it’s worth sticking with for a bit. There are separate fields for acts, sections, sub-sections; judges; parties by name; bench strength; and more.

The BCI search screen

Most fields have drop-down lists, and the integration between the fields is accurate. For instance, if you select the Civil Procedure Code as your principal act, the corresponding fields alter to sections, orders and rules.

The search box set at the top of the screen allows for searches by equivalent citations. This can be very useful if you can’t lay your hands on one particular reporter.

A word about the interface fonts. In the earlier versions, the interface defaulted to some really ugly system font. This problem seems to have been addressed now and the user interfaces accepts large screen resolutions gracefully.

Search

Unlike SCC Online, the BCI Search does not seem to support complex Boolean operators like AND, NOT or the very useful NEAR. BCI does support phrase-searches, by using the radio button. Multiple phrases can be searched by separating them with a comma.

The results are reasonably quick and very accurate. A combination of the search parameters makes it extremely easy to narrow down the search. The fields are themselves intuitive.

The BCI search results

The results are neatly displayed in a tabulated list that can be sorted by citation, appellant, respondent and the date of the judgement. One of the best features of the result display list is the set of four buttons at the bottom of the screen: citations, acts referred, held clause and status. Each of these does exactly what it says: for any item in the list, without even going to the main body of the judgement or order, you can view the citations in the judgement, the acts referred to by the judgement and the “held clause” (I have absolutely no idea what the status button does; as far as I can tell, not very much). The “held clause” button delivers the operative part of the order, extracted from the main body. This can be very useful especially when scanning through a longish list.

The BCI case display

The main judgement screen features font-resizing and, in the top right corner, a tabulated list of equivalent citations. Fortunately, the people at BCI aren’t coy about citing rival reporters. The text can be ported to a Microsoft Word document.

Additional Features

Three additional features are worth noting: bookmarks and the clipboard. The first allows you to “flag” decisions of interest, for quick retrieval later. In the result display list, you check the judgement you want to bookmark and add it. Bookmarks can be quickly scanned later, further narrowing your search. The bookmark screen has a place for notes, too, so this can be used as a basic personal case law diary.

The clipboard feature allows you to take chunks of the judgement (not headnote) and port it to a clipboard, from where it can be pasted into any text-editing application or word processor.

Finally, from the main results screen, the list of decisions or the headnotes of any particular decision in that list can be sent out by email.

MLA

The Maharashtra Local Acts product offers substantially similar functionality. It is a compact and reasonably comprehensive library of statutes and rules, even some that are otherwise hard to find.

The MLA interface

One can search by section, or browse the entire Act: a contents page provides hyperlinks to individual sections. Added to this is the facility for printing the entire Act.

The MLA statute display screen

Database accuracy

The BCI-Search database includes Supreme Court judgements from 1950 to date, cross-referenced to all major reporters (AIR, SCC, JT, SCALE and Supreme). Weekly updates are free downloads, accessed from the BCI-Search interface directly. With a broadband connection, this takes just a few minutes.

Citations of Bombay High Court judgements are cross-referenced to BCR, AIR (Bombay), All.M.R, Mah.L.J. and the BCR Criminal reporters. These are also available for weekly online updates.

Future development

While it is perhaps too early to say, future plans include adding other High Courts as well. This would be welcome. If anything, it’s long overdue.

Pricing and Licensing

For a quotation and a demo, please contact Gagan or Dheeraj Malhotra at: