Until fairly recently, English commercial lawyers had in general three means of keeping up to date with developments in case-law. First, and quickest, were the law reports published in The Times newspaper. In their nature, newspapers are capable of carrying reports immediately after a decision has been made, even if, again perhaps because of their very nature, they have not had a good reputation for reliability and, indeed, in more recent years have not tended to be published so expeditiously as before or with such an even treatment of different areas of interest as previously. It was, therefore, a welcome innovation by The Financial Times five years ago to introduce a series of Commercial Law Reports. The programming of the reports (one report on each of three regular weekdays) has determined an initial criterion to be satisfied for inclusion, limiting the importance that can be accorded to the number of recent important decisions, and has in general precluded a formal report, as opposed to an article, the day after judgment. Nonetheless, the series soon proved popular and has frequently been more expeditious and detailed than that in The Times. For full reports, the lawyer has until recently had to rely on two further sources of a similar nature: the general series of law reports, such as the official Law Reports (including the Weekly Law Reports) and the All England Law Reports’, and the specialized series, such as Lloyd’s Law Reports. Specialist law reporting has increased recently. Oyez’s Commercial Law Reports, which covered ground very similar to that covered by Lloyd’s Law Reports, had only a very short (three years) life but other series, which have managed to carry important decisions which might not otherwise have come so easily to light (most notably Butterworths Company Law Cases, reviewed [1984] 4 LMCLQ 689) have been successful—and this despite the ready availability of transcripts of superior court judgments to subscribers to LEXIS who have become aware of the relevant decisions.

The latest series of law reports to appear is an expanded version of the Financial Times Commercial Law Reports. Published, attractively, in a format similar to that adopted by Lloyd’s Law Reports, Kluwer is, three months after their publication in The Financial Times (which may, of course, be more than three months after judgment), monthly republishing the newspaper reports together with the full texts of the relevant judgments. The newspaper reports are, in essence, summaries of the decision and useful as such in the place for which they are originally prepared. But here they serve basically to provide an unnecessarily lengthy paraphrase of the judgments without being sufficiently concise or restructured to afford the more useful service that is expected from the traditional headnote. A further difficulty lies in divining the precise object of the series, other than to publish in full the cases reported in the newspaper. It perhaps fulfils a function for a subscriber with interests in commercial law in its widest sense—but not all of the F.T. cases fall within the conventional description of commercial law, and most of them are reported in the general series of reports. Clearly, it does not specialize in decisions not reported elsewhere: all but two of the cases in the March and April issues were also reported elsewhere (some in several places) within the first half of 1986 and the remaining two (both of interest in the conflict of laws area) may well be in time though, if not, do not provide a justification for the series, which is not desperately more expeditious than its rivals. The series may well meet a need among a particular group of subscribers, in which case with proper headnoting and perhaps some consideration to the inclusion of arguments it may provide a worthwhile service. On the whole, however, the tendency among law publishers in effect to repackage existing products for commercial motives is to be regretted as it effectively provides a disservice, increasing the existing strains on law libraries and requiring more, even if not a great deal more, effort to ensure consultation of material that is generally available elsewhere and in any case ultimately on LEXIS, to which the researcher