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18 Austl. L. Libr. 227 (2010)
Seeing Justis Being Done: An Interview with Masoud Gerami, Justis Publishing Managing Director

handle is hein.journals/auslwlib18 and id is 238 raw text is: Seeing Justis being done: an interview with Masoud Gerami, Justis Publishing Managing Director Alistair King Email: kingalistair@gmail.com Earlier this year I was contacted by a barrister on England's South Eastern Circuit. The editor of that region's Bar magazine, he invited me to interview my (boss's boss's) boss for his publica- tion, following a sharp rise in awareness of such products as JustCite, the company's provider- neutral citator, which, along with material from all over the common law world, indexes much from Australia. The piece that follows is reproduced pretty much word for word - Australia's Bar and its legal scene at large is, after all, not a million miles from England's, as I've discovered through three years of writing for it and interviewing antipo- dean librarians and practitioners. So Masoud's insights should be no less revealing to readers of the Australian Law Librarian than they were to readers here in England. You trained in engineering and are from Iran, a legally very different place from England. How did you become an expert in electronic common law publishing? I've picked it up along the way purely as a result of starting my career at Eurolex. Though I initially studied electrical engineering, I graduated from Swansea University as a computer scientist. My Eurolex job followed graduation but the Thom- son-owned company was soon sold to Lexis, which retained only its journals. So one of my old professors, another colleague at Eurolex and I got together and started Context, the original name of Justis Publishing. Within a few years we'd broad- ened its reach from European material to case law from England and beyond. AUSTRALIAN LAw LIBRAIAN. Vol 18 No. 3 2010. Tell us about those early years and your rise in the company. It was the tail end of 1985. With a new hardware- based search engine that we wanted to showcase, the three of us approached some venture capi- talists and, with their backing, set up shop in a small building in Maidenhead. By 1986 we'd launched the Justis full-text service, starting with Justis CELEX, and three years later we moved to London when the company was sold to its present owner. I was made technical director in 1990 and managing director in 2001 by the time our data- bases were on the internet. Like anything else, my success stems from hard work and enthusiasm. To some extent it's been luck because I started doing this by accident but the combination of law and technology has been very, very interesting. Justis provided the ICLR's first electronic platform. What challenges did that present? An issue we always had in the early years was persuading our data partners that electronic products wouldn't harm their print revenue but would contribute to an overall gain. Though we 44 Masoud at work. 227

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