Useful legal email services

I subscribe to some very useful free legal email services in order to keep up with cases, reforms and issues which affect my practice. Quite a few of my blog posts arise from matters which I have read in these services, particularly my case summaries.

I thought I would share these services with my readers. I have listed below a hyperlinked title of the particular service (the hyperlink is to the website provider of that service), and to the right of the title is a summary of the email service and how I find it useful.  I have ranked the email services in order, so that the most useful service to me is at the top.

Commercial Court newsletter - The Commercial Court of the Supreme Court of Victoria has one of the best email services for commercial lawyers. The emails contain announcements of recent decisions with keywords and a hyperlink to the Commercial Court summary page and the AustLII publication of the case. Occasionally it contains news of a useful conference or international decision/issue. The emails are sent between 4 times per week and 3 times per day, presumably depending on how busy the Court is.


Lexology - This is a great email service which sends emails once daily on selected topics of interest. The emails usually contain specialised case summaries and articles from high profile law firms (e.g Mallesons, Blake Dawson Waldron, etc). The range of articles is enormous, so you have to be fairly selective when you choose your jurisdiction and your topic. For instance, I have selected the Australian jurisdiction and litigation topic and I still get a lot of information.

Google alerts - Google alerts is a great general email service which can be tailored for a specific search term. It sends emails at a frequently determined by the user on topics which are based on search terms determined by the user. The Google alert emails contain information which has been added to the internet since the previous Google alert email. Some examples of the search terms I use are: "Civil Procedure Act 2010", "Australian Consumer Law" and "Evidence Act 2008".

LexisNexis LegalExpress - This is a new service from LexisNexis. It allows you to select your preferred topics and it sends a daily email which contains new legislation from the LexisNexis Lawnow service and case summaries from recent decisions on the LexisNexis Casebase service. It is useful as a free service to the extent that it is a summary, as access to Lawnow and Casebase is via paid subscription. However, I have found that most of the cases and legislation that are summarised in the LegalExpress emails are also on AustLII.

Judicial College of Victoria updates - This is a service which sends emails whenever one of the publications on the Judicial College of Victoria website is updated. Every now and then an update occurs to the uniform Evidence Act resources or the Civil Procedure Bench Book which I find useful.

The New Lawyer and Lawyers Weekly - Both services are similar in content. They are both journalistic publications which send daily emails containing news of law firm issues, big corporate deals and government matters.

Let me know if you have any more email services which I have not listed above.