For more than thirty years, Lexum has leveraged its technological expertise to make official legal information more accessible.
Today, its solutions are used by many judicial institutions across North America to modernize access to law and improve online legal research.
In this context, the Arkansas Judiciary, which brings together the Supreme Court and the Court of Appeals of the state, chose Norma, Lexum’s integrated platform, to modernize its website for publishing judicial opinions.
Arkansas is among the first U.S. states to adopt a “Digital First” approach to publishing its opinions. The courts no longer produce printed volumes and now rely entirely on their website for official publication — a forward-looking decision that makes the choice of Norma a key asset in achieving this digital transformation.
In addition to judicial opinions, the Arkansas Court Rules are now powered by Norma’s interactive viewer, providing a user-friendly, searchable, and accessible interface for navigating the rules of court online.
💡 Note
In the U.S. judicial system, the term “opinion” refers to the written and reasoned decision of a court.
Official opinions are those revised, published and recognized as precedents, while unofficial opinions may include unpublished or memorandum decisions that are still informative but not binding.
An Outdated and Unfriendly Website
Before adopting Norma, the Arkansas Judiciary’s opinion publication platform relied on a generic Commercial Off-The-Shelf (COTS) software that was not designed for legal research.
The technical interface made it difficult to formulate queries — both for citizens and judicial employees.
Moreover, the overall design and navigation were reminiscent of early generations of desktop applications rather than the modern web platforms users expect today.
Replacing an aging system with an intuitive, fast platform designed for the needs of contemporary legal research.
Norma: An Interface Designed for Legal Research
To meet this challenge, the Arkansas Judiciary selected Lexum’s Norma, recognized for its flexible integration and user-friendly interface dedicated to advanced legal research.
With Norma, the Arkansas Judiciary now benefits from:
- Full-text search with highlighted results;
- Dynamic filters for efficiently narrowing search results;
- Auto-completion and auto-correction features;
- Simultaneous access to opinions and court rules in both HTML and PDF;
- A modern and consistent display of decisions and court rules.
On the administrative side, the Arkansas Judiciary benefits from a streamlined publishing process that saves time for clerks and simplifies the regular updating of the database.
This efficiency is made possible by Norma’s adaptability to the diverse metadata structures of official documents and by its automatic metadata extraction tool, which operates directly from the text of the opinions.
Over 75,000 official and unofficial opinions from Arkansas are centralized — easily accessible online and simple to explore.
Thanks to Norma, legal research has become faster, more intuitive, and accessible to all.
Interface of the site opinions.arcourts.gov enabling centralized search of decisions from the Arkansas Supreme Court and Court of Appeals.
A Smooth and Uninterrupted Transition
To meet this challenge, the Arkansas Judiciary selected Lexum’s Norma, recognized for its fleThe implementation of Norma within the Arkansas Judiciary followed a carefully planned schedule, ensuring a complete data migration and continuous service.
The Lexum team supported IT managers and judicial staff at every stage of the project: from migrating historical archives to training users on the new interface, as well as establishing a unified search architecture.
Thanks to this methodical execution, the transition was completed smoothly, delivering from the very start a modernized, consistent, and fully functional research experience for all users.
Modern, Fast, and Unified Access
Thanks to Norma, the Arkansas judicial opinions portal is now:
- Faster, with a high-performance search engine;
- More intuitive, with a modern interface suitable for all audiences;
- More comprehensive, by gathering all official and unofficial opinions in one environment;
- More efficient, through the automation of publication tasks.
Norma has enabled the Arkansas Judiciary to offer an exemplary public access to its decisions and to position itself as a model of transparency and dissemination of law in the United States.
Beyond improving access, Norma also played a key role in enabling the Arkansas Judiciary’s “Digital First” strategy, which prioritizes online publication as the sole official medium for judicial opinions.
By fully relying on Norma, Arkansas became one of the first U.S. states to implement a 100% digital publication model for the dissemination of its appellate courts decisions.
Access the Arkansas Judicial Opinions Repository:
opinions.arcourts.gov
