So you want to leave Jurism and return to Zotero
For legal academics, the Jurism branch of Zotero has been a splendid gift for years. It allowed cases and legislation to be accommodated in Zotero, making legal research far smoother. (Though, I confess, I never managed to optimise the legal side of Jurism as much as I had hoped – I often ended up manually referencing cases and legislation and using cross-references as required.)
For the last few years, though, Jurism has not been updated or supported (since 2023) and there’s no real sign that it will change. On the other hand, Zotero has been getting regular updates, improvements and support for newer machines and Word/OS versions.
So what should we do if we are using Jurism? I found my version became slower and slower, and was having more and more errors. My Zotero Chrome connector stopped working. Jurism stopped being able to look up DOIs or ISBNs. My keyboard shortcuts didn’t work. It was exasperating. But I also have 6300+ items in my Zotero library, so absolutely didn’t want to start again.
I found a solution, cobbled together from various online forums (and assuming you are using a downloaded desktop version of Jurism):
- Sync your Jurism library with Zotero Online (my Jurism eventually even stopped syncing, so you might have to re-add more recent items)
- Download Zotero
- Sync your library from Zotero Online into the Zotero desktop version
- Delete or just close Jurism
I updated my Chrome connector and Word processor plug-in, but that is probably not strictly necessary – Jurism uses the same ones.
The process was pretty seamless, to my great relief, at least so far. Zotero 8 is so much faster than Jurism, everything seems to be working happily, and there are AGLC and OSCOLA styles for Zotero. If you use the cases and legislation referencing function in Jurism, it is going to be a sad shift. I may yet find that some references are using fields that don’t exist in Zotero (not an issue so far). But I am just relieved to have a seamless reference manager again.
