Traditional search engines often require a lawyer to filter through large quantities of irrelevant data. Visual search engines can help the researcher by clustering hits around various topics related to the search query.

LEARNING SYNOPSIS
This exercise introduces visual search engines for performing legal English research online.

EXERCISE
Your firm represents a multi-national engineering company, headquartered in Sydney. A dispute has arisen involving the construction of electricity receiving stations constructed in Finland by your client and the electricity supplied to these stations from a Russian generating plant, also built by your client.

Your client’s Finnish customer has claimed that the receiving stations were defective. The customer is also claiming that the electrical supply from Russia exceeded the permissible power levels for the Finnish receiving stations.

Significantly, the part of the contract involving the construction of the electrical receiving facilities was very well documented. However, the provision of electricity was agreed upon after the initial contract. To complicate the matter, the electricity supply agreement was negotiated by telephone and the terms of the agreement were settled by the electronic exchange of documents.

You have been asked to conduct preliminary research on the following aspects of the matter before instructing counsel in Finland:

1) Does the United Nations Convention on Contracts for the International Sale of
Goods (CISG) apply to construction agreements?

2) Does the CISG apply to agreements for the supply of electricity?

3) Does the fact that the contract for the supply of electricity was electronic affect
the application of the CISG?