New Zealand Law Reports entire collection now online

THE FIRST 76 volumes of the New Zealand Law Reports (NZLR), dating from 1883, have been digitised and are now available to online subscribers of the service. The project was initiated and funded by The New Zealand Council of Law Reporting (Council) to complement the already available online access for cases reported from 1958 onwards, and was completed under contract in February by LexisNexis.

Commenced in October last year, the five-month digital conversion process involved scanning the original NZLR volumes, rekeying all the text (over 200 million keystrokes), and applying formatting for online use.

Over 10,500 cases have been added to the Global Legal Platform provided by LexisNexis, more than doubling the content previously available. This initiative completes the online offering for NZLR, New Zealand’s only official series of law reports, published by LexisNexis on behalf of the Council.

Council Deputy Chair Peter Jenkin QC expressed pleasure on behalf of the Council in achieving its long-standing goal of providing a fully electronic version of the NZLRs. “To have completed this task at a very reasonable cost has been a great achievement by all concerned,” he said.

“This has been a fantastic project to be involved in, both from an historical and technical point of view, and my team have worked really hard in achieving the outcome in such a short period of time,” said Richard Morpeth, Reports and Operations Managing Editor for LexisNexis.