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Bar News - June 20, 2003 Introducing... the 'Supreme Court at a Glance' By: Benjamin T. King A new way to stay up to date TRADITIONALLY, NEW HAMPSHIRE Bar News has published multi-paragraph, detailed summaries of New Hampshire Supreme Court decisions. The Bar News Editorial Advisory Board now questions the usefulness of this practice. Summaries – in an age of easy electronic access to decisions via e-mail and the Web – are both too much and not enough. If a decision interests you, a summary won’t be enough – you will go right to the full text of the decision, right? If the decision is not immediately relevant, chances are you won’t bother to keep reading once you know the subject matter and the holding. Furthermore, the supervised law students who have been composing the summaries have been hard-pressed to keep up with the output of the court, and the summaries published in Bar News now lag many months behind the issuance of decisions. The Bar News Board recently deliberated on better ways to help the Bar stay up to speed with the Supreme Court’s latest cases. As a result, we are going to be trying a new approach. It is an index, to be called "Supreme Court at a Glance," and the first version, covering decisions issued in May 2003, is published on page 19. "At a Glance" describes 12 decisions issued last month, divided into six categories: civil, criminal, domestic, probate, workers’ compensation and administrative. For each case, we identify the issues the Supreme Court confronted. So, if you are a lawyer with a case involving, say, the Financial Responsibility Act, a quick look at the cases listed in the civil category will tell you that the court addressed that act in a decision handed down on May 9. You can then review the case at www.courts.state.nh.us. We hope this index proves useful for you. As always, we welcome your comments and suggestions for improvements, and this feature should be considered a work-in-progress for the next few months. The index is also going to be a collaborative endeavor, and we invite members of the Bar, either as firms or individually, to volunteer to take responsibility for "Supreme Court at a Glance" for a particular month. The "At a Glance" for that particular month will be bylined, and we also will be encouraging lawyers or law firms, as a sideline to the index, to include a couple of paragraphs regarding a particularly significant decision issued during that month. Timely coverage of case law is more important than ever, and we are interested in your input on how Bar News can help you keep up with the latest developments.
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