The Bluebook

Not to be confused with the car pricing bible, The Bluebook is the nearly hundred-year-old legal citation standards manual established and maintained by Harvard Law Review, Columbia Law Review, the University of Pennsylvania Law Review, and The Yale Law Journal.

The de facto system of legal citation, The Bluebook has a steep learning curve, demanding a user sometimes consult many different sections, pages, and tables to build a single correct citation. Many law professionals have organized the book according to their own habits and needs – a ‘work hack’ we observed during our research – while regular users, such as law librarians, have an uncanny physical memory of its contents.

Drawing from that physicality, we worked closely with The Bluebook team and a small army of real-world users to better adapt the ‘spirit’ of the book to a screen-based interface.

To help facilitate the page-to-page comparisons – typically accomplished by a rather tedious flipping back-and-forth in the print edition, or by opening multiple tabs in the old digital one – the new UI can display various rules in a single screen. Individual rules can also be pinned, saved, and organized for future use, which alongside notes can be distributed to colleagues within the user’s law practice. A custom predictive search, perhaps the most significant update, includes rule previews to quickly help users discern important nuances between similar rules. And finally, though complex, the digital Bluebook works seamlessly on mobile devices, useful as a quick reference guide or second screen for power users.

All of this adds up to an experience that we hope for its mostly young, mostly stressed-out legal assistants, is – if not moderately enjoyable – at least significantly less onerous.