The standard model for online legal publishers is to collect all their partners’ laws in a single database and disseminate them onto a generic website. Because all publications—and the vast legal data used to make them—are run through the same platform, performance of the whole site is disrupted. The site is inherently slow and minor bugs in other publications can slow or stop your own publication.
But the most glaring issue with this model is that the publisher, and not the city, owns and controls both the database and the website. If your government’s relationship with the publisher ends, you lose the ability to publish your laws online.
At Open Law Library, our mission is to empower governments and the people they serve to take control of their digital legal collections, so they always have fast, open-source, and up-to-date access to the law.
Unlike other publishing platforms, Open Law Publish creates separate digital law libraries for each of our government partners. Each partner wholly owns and controls its library, which is never restricted by copyright, terms of service, or fees. This means your publication is not beholden to a third-party publisher and always remains free and accessible to your government and its people.
Digital law libraries created with the Open Law Platform are customized with the government’s styles and branding and are hosted on the government’s own domain. They are lightning fast—even for those with dial-up or low bandwidth internet connections—and contain state of the art legal research features, such as advanced search, dynamic tables of contents, annotations, and hyperlinks to every citable element of law.
Take back control of your laws! Reach out to us today to learn more about how we can build a digital law library for your government!
