This week we launch a new product type to our Company and Securities collection on Brookers Online. We’re excited to present our first truly topic-based treatment of an area of the law.

While our collection is strong in commentary based around legislation, we felt there was an opportunity for our online service to better cater to users who want to browse or search company, securities or insolvency law by topic or legal principle. We already had in our catalogue Company & Securities Law in New Zealand (Farrar ed, Brookers Ltd 2008) an award-winning work of high-quality commentary on that very subject area. But how best to include this valuable work in our online services?

We felt that it wasn’t enough to simply republish the book through our online service. We thought hard about what it is that you, our customers, value and what we could add to the product in terms of both functionality and content.

The content part was easy. Transforming this product into an online database gives us the freedom to update the commentary as new case law and legislation developments arise. We approached the Company & Securities Law in New Zealand  author team. They too saw the value in maintaining the currency of the product content, instead of waiting years for the next opportunity to update what they had written, and under the auspices of general editors John Farrar and Susan Watson, the entire author team signed on to update the commentary on an ongoing basis.

The functionality was a more challenging proposition. How could we fully realise the potential of this content online? Putting the text online would naturally allow linking and searching, but this still didn’t feel like enough.  We wanted this product to be a first port of call for research in an area of law. So we recruited Linda Howes, our internal company and securities author to systematically work through the book and identify helpful cross-references to our other online content. If, for example, you are brushing up on the registration of a client’s company at subchapter 2.3 of Company & Securities Law in New Zealand you will see the “Further Resources” for that section providing links to all the relevant application forms in Brookers Company Precedents.

Similar links will take you to the latest commentary in our online legislation based products, Company and Securities Law and Insolvency Law. To help you search the content, we’ve applied our BriefCase legal classifications across all the content too. This will helpfully identify all the sections of the text that touch on any particular topic.

That’s only some of the highlights of this exciting new product type. If you’d like to learn more check out the video.

Or read interviews with  Company and Securities Law in New Zealand  editors John Farrar and Susan Watson.