Open Law Technology
Our open law technology solutions simplify the creation, management, publication and distribution of legal information. From low-level support libraries all the way up to turnkey legislation database systems, we cover all parts of the legal information management hierarchy.
1. Digitise
2. Publish
3. Enrich
Digitise legislation
Indigo Legislation Platform
Indigo is our flagship product for managing a legislation database. Markup, amend and publish a wide variety of legislative documents in Akoma Ntoso XML.
Designed for evolving legislation
- Publish up-to-date leglisation in minutes.
- First-class support for the full legislation lifecycle: publication, commencement, amendment and repeal.
- Commencement tracking for entire documents, or just specific provisions.
- Visualise differences between different amended versions.
A legislation-specific editorial workflow
- Focus on content and structure, and Indigo will take care of formatting and layout for you.
- Let your editorial team collaborate effectively with document annotations and a flexible task system.
- Two-step reviews to ensure accuracy and quality.
- Automated editorial guidance to encourage high quality document markup and help with common errors, such as incorrect section numbering.
- Integrates into Gazettes.Africa for original Gazette publication tracking and linking.
Integrate your content into your existing systems
- Publish legislation to your website, app or partners through a flexible API that is easy for other systems to integrate with.
- Export legislation in a variety of formats: Akoma Ntoso XML, HTML, ePUB and high-quality, print-ready PDF.
- Integrations directly into our LIIWeb legal content platform.
Ready for Africa and the world
- Supports the Laws.Africa Akoma Ntoso for Africa (AKN4Africa) recommendation.
- Supports the Akoma Ntoso for United Nations (AKN4UN) recommendation.
- Supports multiple languages, including English, French, Portuguese and Swahili.
Use our cloud-based solution, or self-host on your hardware in your datacenters.
We provide a full range of customisation, training and support services for management, editorial staff and IT administrators to help you get the most out of Indigo.
Publish legal information
LIIWeb
LIIWeb is an all-in-one legal information website built on the Django platform.
First-class support for publishing key primary legal information materials: legislation, court judgments and government gazettes.
- Add your own content types using all the power and flexibility of Drupal.
- Integrates with the Indigo Legislation Platform to publish Akoma Ntoso (AKN) legislation with rich, interactive reading experiences.
Advanced search and discovery
- Faceted, full-text and boolean search
- Flexible content taxonomies
- Linking between related documents
Reach wide audience
- Optimised for mobile phones so that information is accessible to anyone, anywhere.
- Integrates with PocketLaw for a fully offline experience.
PocketLaw
PocketLaw is a desktop research application that provides a complete offline copy of your legal information website.
- Enables conducting legal research in areas with limited, restricted or expensive Internet access.
- Take only what you need: our Content Pack technology lets you choose what parts of your website you want to make available offline. Works on Windows, Mac OS and Ubuntu.
- Can be installed from a USB stick, for easy distribution to your team.
- Integrates into our LIIWeb legal information website system.
Create and work with structured legislative text
Bluebell
Create rich, standards-compliant Akoma Ntoso XML documents without worrying about XML.
Bluebell is a plain text language similar to Markdown that simplifies the authoring of Akoma Ntoso XML documents without requiring any knowledge of XML. Bluebell understands the hierarchy of Akoma Ntoso documents and structural elements, and guarantees valid and standards-compliant Akoma Ntoso 3.0 XML.
No XML skills or knowledge is required. Bluebell is easy for non-technical editors to learn and use.
Akoma Ntoso features supported:
- Six primary document types: Act, Bill, Debate Report, Judgment, Doc, Statement
- All hierarchical elements (parts, chapters, sections, paragraphs, sub-paragraphs, etc.)
- Tables
- Footnotes
- Quotes
- Editorial remarks
- Bulleted lists and numbered lists
- Attachments
- Images
- Inlines: bold, italics, underline, ref, sup, abbr, em, term, ins, del, inline,
Rich syntax highlighting for Microsoft’s Monaco editor makes Bluebell easy to read and edit.
Cobalt
Cobalt is a lightweight wrapper for working with Akoma Ntoso XML documents in Python.
Cobalt provides a simple, object-like interface for working with the key details of Akoma Ntoso documents, as well as direct XML access for when you need to work with the XML directly.
Parse and validate Akoma Ntoso documents against both a strict and a relaxed Akoma Ntoso 3.0 schema.
Cobalt is used in most of our software products.