The Attorney General’s Department has striven to maximise the benefits available through the electronic delivery of services to both its external and intra-departmental clients.

The department’s range of electronic services is extensive, and it has either implemented or is in the process of designing and trialing the following services:

Lawlink NSW Website

The success of the department’s implementation and design of these electronic services is reflected in the exceptional growth in the number of users of the department’s website, Lawlink NSW. During the 1999 calendar year, the website registered a sixfold growth in the number of pages viewed from over 220,000 to 1.2 million per month and by June 2000 LawLink NSW was registering over 1.9 million pages viewed per month.

The high quality of information available on this website, its practicability for web users and ease of navigation and accessibility is reflected in the fact that in May 2000, Top100 an Internet based rating organisation rated LawLink NSW as the most popular legal website in Australia.

Lawlink NSW offers users online access to thousands of pages of legal information including:

· downloadable forms from the Supreme Court, Administrative Decisions Tribunal, Victims Compensation Tribunal and Industrial Relations Commission;
· a history of the NSW Legal system for students and historians;
· plain English Guide to lodging an application in the Land and Environment Court;
· factsheets on discrimination and lodging complaints at the Anti-Discrimination Board (with the Board registering as one of the strongest sites on Lawlink NSW with nearly 120,000 pages viewed in June, 2000 alone);
· brochures on privacy laws in NSW;
· guidelines and policies on public and private guardianship;
· information on applying for probate in the Supreme Court;
· an overview of the criminal trial process in the District Court;
· the full text of selected Law Reform Commission reports going back to 1968; and
· crime trends and bulletins from the Bureau of Crime Statistics and Research.

CaseLaw NSW Website

CaseLaw NSW was launched in May 1999 and is an online database incorporating multiple courts through one entry point including the Supreme Court, NSW Court of Appeal and Criminal Appeal, Land and Environment Court, the Administrative Decisions Tribunal and the Industrial Relations Commission. In the coming year, it is estimated that Caselaw NSW will register over 1.5 million page views.

CaseLaw NSW databases are sourced directly from the participating courts and tribunals and as a result decisions are available more quickly than on any other free Internet service in Australia. In fact, the judgments are usually made available to the public on the same day as the decision is handed down, often within a few hours.

The implementation of a new form of citation by participating courts and tribunals during 1999 means that judgments published electronically via CaseLaw NSW can now be cited in court. This gives practitioners, and the community, complete access to the major decisions of these courts and provides cheaper access to an accessible source of legal precedents.

Design of the site is based upon intuitive navigation and addresses appropriate accessibility issues. To further assist web users accessing the Caselaw site, a new search engine has been designed with testing and implementation of this search engine scheduled to be completed by October 2000.

CaseLaw NSW was a semi-finalist for an Australian Internet Award for best professional/industry web site in 1999.

Court Lists

Daily court lists are available on LawLink NSW. A subscription service that allows lawyers to automatically receive court lists every day via e-mail is also in operation.

LawZone Project

This project is in collaboration with other justice sector organisations, including the Law Foundation, Law Society, Department of Fair Trading, Legal Aid Commission, Legal Information Access Centres and Redfern Legal Centre the Department. Its aim is to develop and implement a new search facility based on metadata that will provide a more reliable result for Internet users searching for legal resources.

NSW Online Genealogical Indexes

In March 1999, the Registry of Births, Deaths and Marriages began offering online free searches of its Birth, Death and Marriage indexes, enabling clients to find genealogical information for family history research leading to the purchase of certificate copies.

In April 2000, the Registry of Births Deaths and Marriage’s NSW online genealogical indexes site recorded approximately 20,000 searches on average each day.

E-commerce

The Registry of Births Deaths and Marriages is currently trialing a new system to allow users to pay for certificates online via credit card. The introduction OCV will remove the need for manual verification of payment details using instead an automated procedure with the customer’s credit card details being transmitted to the ANZ bank for real time verification and deduction of funds. This service will be a test bed for extending Internet payment services across the Department and courts.

Secure Lodgment of Court Documents and Electronic Signatures

In collaboration with the legal profession, the Law Society of NSW and Land and Environment Court, the Department is currently designing a system to allow legal practitioners to lodge court documents online while ensuring the security, authenticity and integrity of the lodgment.

The security issues are will be resolved through the introduction of a system of electronic signatures or PKI (Public Key Infrastructure), the testing of which is being currently undertaken by the Department.

Electronic Credit Card Payments

The State Debt Recovery Office is currently involved in the development and implementation of a facility to allow credit card payments for SDRO debtors via the telephone using an Interactive Voice Recognition (IVR) system. The system will be established in conjunction with Telstra using a 'piggy back' mechanism onto the existing Australia Post payments system already utilised by SDRO for its manual payments.

Online Transcript Service

The Reporting Services Bureau is currently developing an online ordering and delivery of transcripts to judges, the court, parties to the case and other qualified persons.

Online Birth, Death and Marriage Certificate Validation

The Registry of Birth, Deaths and Marriages (BDM) is currently trialing this project which will allow service providers such as the banks, RTA and Social Security to check details of a birth, death and marriage certificate on line via restricted access to the BDM database. This service is designed to reduce the incidence of forged birth certificates being used when an identification process is required and also creates a new revenue stream for the Registry to support its role as the first point of contact in NSW for life event data.

On-line life event registration

During 1999 the Registry of Births Deaths and Marriages commenced a trial of a new service to allow providers of registration data (ie. the Department of Health for births, Funeral Directors for deaths and Celebrants for marriages) to submit their data electronically using the Internet.

A prototype system is being trialed for the on line registration of deaths by Funeral Directors. When fully operational, this service will reduce data preparation costs, and data entry errors, freeing Registry staff to concentrate on other value added client service functions. It will also improve the timeliness of registrations.

Infolink Intranet Facility

The Attorney General’s department offers an Intranet facility, Infolink, which provides a bulletin board and information service, including updates on staff matters, management tools and current issues, such as the Olympics for which an information site was developed.

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