News Release

A unique gateway to timely legal and financial information

Business Announcement

EUREKA

In Croatia, access to legal and financial information has been available to the commercial and public sectors from a variety of internet sites and other forms of media, but until recently there has been no single, online resource they can use to source accurate, up-to-the-minute data quickly. Now, thanks to the ingenious and easy-to-use portal designed and developed by the Slovenian and Croatian partners of EUREKA project E! 3865 LEX-INFO, the latest information on all things legal, taxation and financial is available to subscribers in a few clicks of a mouse.

The partners' intention was to develop a one-stop internet tool for subscribers that is both highly efficient and fast to use. Slovenian company Tax-Fin-Lex Information and Services, the project's lead partner, has many years of experience in legal informatics, which is the application of technology to the organisation, storage, retrieval and dissemination of legal information.

In 2005, the company successfully developed and launched just such a portal in Slovenia and wanted to use it as a model for Croatia, which has a similar legal system. A EUREKA project proved the ideal medium, and a team of five partners was put together experienced in the fields of information systems, IT technologies and economics and market research.

According to Zlata Tavcar, who headed up the project for Tax-Fin-Lex: "EUREKA's reputation, and its endorsement of our project, was an important factor in the successful implementation and launch of the portal. The organisation's ability to facilitate contacts and communication on our behalf at both national and EU levels proved invaluable."

A fast route to information

The portal is accessible on a subscription basis and can be used by a wide range of public and private sector professionals, including government civil servants, lawyers and other members of the judicial system, auditors and accountants, VAT and tax inspectors, businesses and tax payers.

Updated daily, it provides access to a cornucopia of information, including tax and financial accounting regulations, guidance and other data, legal literature, court judgements and case law, expert advice and opinions. Also available are EU legislation and all Croatian laws and bye-laws enacted since the country became an independent republic in 1991, as well as the latest amendments to legislation and regulations.

"The IT platform we have used is universal and based on the latest Microsoft technology and document management and warehousing systems, making it eminently transferable to other countries in the Balkan region," says Tavcar.

Timely – and timesaving

Although most of the information is available free from other sources, the project team's extensive market research had confirmed that information-hungry but time-poor professionals would be prepared to pay a subscription to utilise the portal because of its unique selling proposition: all the information is organised in a timeline so the user obtains the most up-to-date information, and can check back to earlier versions for a required time period. For example, when the Croatian parliament amends a piece of legislation, the corresponding entry on the portal is updated appropriately, together with the date of the amendment, and it's this up-to-the-minute version that the subscriber sees first.

Additionally, all documents, articles, judgements, guidance, opinions and forms on a particular legal, taxation or financial topic are linked to each other and to any original versions on the legal basis of which they were drafted. Thus a lawyer or barrister preparing a case on behalf of a client can check out a point of law and with a click, connect to the relevant supporting case law. "With all the information located in one place, a subscriber can now save potentially hours of time and tedium searching for data – it's all available with a few clicks," says Tavcar.

Greater judicial transparency

As an information tool LEX-INFO has other more fundamental benefits over existing, more 'piecemeal' information systems and sources. By making court decisions available online, for example, it offers the possibility of greater transparency and accountability of the Croatian judicial system, and quicker access to legal information could also help to improve court efficiency. Last but not least, it provides other countries with easy access to information about Croatia's judiciary, tax and accounting systems.

The LEX-INFO portal has been up and running successfully since September 2007 (www.tax-fin-lex.hr) and is hosted by Tax-Fin-Lex in Slovenia. The service already has approximately 7,000 users, split almost equally between the public and private sectors, and there are plans to roll out the concept as a franchise in other countries, says Tavcar. "Our company's goal is to transfer all of the know-how we have developed over the past 15 years to other countries and establish portals with local content in the same value-added format."

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To view the full success story, visit http://www.eureka.be/lex-info


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