In October 2018, Lexum won a public tender issued by the New Mexico Compilation Commission (NMCC) for the publishing of the State official laws. Lexum technology was selected to modernize NMOneSource™, which is the official source for legal information originating from the State of New Mexico.
The Challenge
Over the last fifteen years, the State of New Mexico has been its own self-publisher of its official laws. NMCC has been providing three distinct online services: its agency website for posting slip opinions, formal and unreported opinions and new court rule amendments on behalf of the Supreme Court of New Mexico; a free, word-searchable online database of unannotated statutes at the request of the state legislature; and a legal research service called NMOneSource where legal professionals could gain online access to the official, annotated compilation of primary legal information relied upon by the courts and the legislature. Over the years, the technology supporting NMOneSource had fallen behind the rest of the legal publishing industry as the demand for free access increased. This prompted the NMCC to initiate a formal procurement to modernize its online publishing, reduce its operational costs and provide the legal research service, NMOneSource.com, for free to the citizens.
The Solution
Lexum designed a publishing website meeting the requirements of the NMCC for providing access to:
- The New Mexico constitution;
- Territorial laws and treaties;
- Session laws;
- Codified statutes (including annual historical versions);
- New Mexico Appellate Reports;
- Slip opinions and unpublished decisions from the Supreme Court and the Court of Appeals;
- Annotated Rules of the Court (including annual historical versions).
- Attorney General opinions.
The solution designed and developed by Lexum is powered by its three products: Decisia for content management and for the delivery of case law material; Qweri for the delivery of legislative material; and Lexbox for user accounts management, content alerts, and email notifications. Moreover an internal citator designed specifically for the processing of New Mexico material generates links on legal citations included in the body of documents and provide a note up feature. The solution makes all primary legal information from New Mexico available under a unified environment. All search features are provided by Solex, Lexum’s search engine designed specifically for legal information.
Lexum technology allows the Compilation Commission to optimize publishing processes and realize operational savings, making free online access a reality.
– Brenda Castello, Executive Director of the New Mexico Compilation Commission (NMCC)
One of the major goals of the NMCC was to have the new system in place by May 1st, 2019, as the contract with its previous provider was terminating at that date. Lexum put in place an aggressive rollout schedule enabling to meet this deadline. An early mission on site aligned both parties on deliverables, and weekly project management meetings were scheduled. The client data was migrated from a variety of sources, including Folio View, WordPerfect, MS-Word, and XML, in parallel to the setup of the database. A preliminary version of the system was delivered to the NMCC in January 2019, and a beta version made available to existing registered users for testing purpose was released in March 2019. The ready-for-launch version was released in April and was officially deployed by the NMCC on May 1st, 2019.