The National Council for Law Reporting is exploring the idea of offering a premium subscription-based service, whereby users would need to pay to access certain content published in its Kenya Law magazine.
Currently, the magazine is running an anonymous public survey on its website seeking feedback from Kenyans on what services they would be willing to pay a subscription fee for.
"The National Council for Law Reporting (Kenya Law) is committed to enhancing your experience with the newly upgraded Kenya Law website - new.kenyalaw.org, designed to provide faster access, better search capabilities, and an optimised user experience," the survey reads in part.
"With this enhanced platform, we are exploring premium subscriptions to exclusive tools for your in-depth legal research."
The site has changed its domain to new.kenyalaw.org. The previous domain, KenyaLaw.org, no longer works.
The Kenya Law site, run by the National Council for Law, offers essential public information like the weekly and special gazette notices on government policy changes, appointments, among other public announcements.
Primarily, it provides a law database, providing access to a wide range of legal documents, including the Laws of Kenya, Kenya Law Reports, and other official publications.
Other services it offers are Parliamentary reports, county legislation reports, and partnerships with other institutions, including universities, to promote legal knowledge and excellence.
The survey will run between August 12 and September 12 and can be accessed through the official social media platforms of Kenya Law.
Although it has not clarified which services it is exploring to make premium, it revealed that it will include exclusive tools to support in-depth legal research.
According to the survey, these could include Advanced Search - Case Law Database, Advanced Search - Laws of Kenya Database, Advanced Search - Kenya Gazette Database, Case Citator (view case citations), Case History (track case progression from Subordinate Court to Supreme Court), Document versioning for legislation (point-in-time access), and Medium Neutral Citation (MNC) for case identification.
Among the questions asked in the survey are which databases, between Case Law, Laws of Kenya and Kenya Gazette, one frequently visits and which subscription, between annual, monthly, weekly, Pay-per-View (individual access per case/document) and Pay-per-Download, they would prefer.
