Firstlaw.ie what are your thoughts

pirelli

I was wondering your honest opinions were of firts law . ie . Is it inexpensive or is it really worth the fee. Roughly 540 euro - 700 euro and a huge discount for students. Is there an alternative or would the library be a beter alternative.Is it available in Griffith college,

Tom Young

Its pretty good along with westlaw and justis, I'd have thought most good legal colleges would have group access to it.

PS: Don't know, I'm not affiliated with GCD, but if its not it should be.

johnnyskeleton

I use www.justis.com & www.courts.ie.

I never saw the point in the other ones.

Tom Young

The Citator is not at all bad on westlaw, saves a long period checking statute and indexes, then again Sweet and Maxwell are about a year behind.

Thirdfox

I use justis, courts.ie and lexis-nexis (the last one is least used since it's so powerful).

juke

I use Firstlaw.ie for the EAT judgements - I'm not aware if they are available elsewhere

Silverfox

I use Westlaw and Justis. They primarily have the IRs and IRLMs along with loads of other stuff between them and either Bailii or Irlii can usually cover what they don't have. I find Firstlaw a nightmare to use (although I also feel this way about Lexis) and avoid unless I can't find what I'm looking for absolutely anywhere else. And even then, it's unlikely to be on Firstlaw if it's nowhere else to be found.

pirelli

I have just signed up for westlaw so I will be able to make comparisons between them.The thread was because i was wondering if first law was worth the investment. To be honest it is a great source of legal dairies etc, and weekly and sometimes daily judgements.I do have difficulties searching for cases sometimes although they are there just difficult to source.I have also discovered that sometimes you can find a case ( pre 1997 ) and other times its not there.It's bewildering.

Tom Young

As mentioned above, the citator is brilliant also. It saves countless hours in a library. Its listed under Annotated Statutes.

scorplett

GCD currently has subscriptions to LexisNexis, Westlaw.ie and Westlaw UK . I believe there are talks about adding justis to that also.
I find westlaw, bialli and courts.ie to throw up most of what I need though.
I have heard that Justis is fast becoming the standard as the reports are facsimile's of the actual judgements rather than juniors reporting them. So there are less occurrences of mistakes etc.
Personally I wouldn't pay for most of the subscription services as a large percentage of cases are available through non subscription sites.

_JOE_

I'm a fan of westlaw myself, though I have access to a huge amount of material through my Athens login at UCD. If anybody needs anything in particular searched I would be more than happy to help.

First post on the board, I've had problems gaining access for longer than you would believe. Anyway, I'm a final year law student at UCD and i'm looking forward to some interesting discussions in the coming year.

Joe

EdgarAllenPoo

LexisNexis is a pain for Irish cases and Westlaw is good for some cases but not so good for articles. GCD also have HeinOnline which (maybe it's just me) doesn't seem to be too good.

superficies

Actually for advanced legal research (especially at PhD level) HeinOnLine is brilliant because it has PDFs of the journals for readability and pagination are excellent. I find the search facility shockingly bad there though!!