November 15, 2007 by Kevin O'Keefe

Can Westlaw and LexisNexis survive with status quo?

Westlaw has had a lock on the reporting of case law for as long as I can remember. Along with LexisNexis, Thomson West is making billions selling back to the public that which the public owned to begin with - judicial opinions.

public.resource.org free case law fastcase

But an announcement today that Public.Resource.Org and Fastcase, Inc. will make 1.8 million pages of federal case law freely available is a loud message to Toronto and London that selling US law may no longer be a multi-billion dollar business.

In releasing all Courts of Appeals decisions from 1950 to the present and all Supreme Court decisions since 1754, Carl Malamud, CEO of Public.Resource.Org and a leading force in getting government data online, had this to say:

The U.S. judiciary has allowed their entire work product to be locked up behind a cash register. Law is the operating system of our society and today's agreement means anybody can read the source for a substantial amount of case law that was previously unavailable.

Fastcase, the leading developer of next-generation American legal research, unlike Thomson and LexisNexis with expensive subscription fees, is making this law available to Public.Resource.Org for free.

For eight years, Fastcase has been ahead of the market curve, working to democratize access to the law,' said Ed Walters, CEO of Fastcase, Inc. 'At the same time, we have been advancing the science of search, combining the precision of traditional legal research with the simplicity of Web-based searches.

Fastcase is no Johnny-come-lately to the law. They're already contracting directly with 11 state bar associations to make the national law library free for lawyers in their states.

The free case law will start being available early 2008 under a new Creative Commons mark—CC-Ø—that signals that there are no copyrights or other related rights attached to the content.

Public.Resource.Org will organize the law with 'star' mapping software, that allows the insertion of markers that will approximate page breaks based on user-furnished parameters such as page size, margins, and fonts. 'Wiki' technology will be used to allow the public to move around these 'star' markers, as well as add summaries, classifications, keywords, alternate numbering systems for citation purposes, and ratings or 'diggs' on opinions.

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August 22, 2007 by Kevin O'Keefe

Law should be free 'Robin Hoods' take on LexisNexis and Thomson West

The Thomson West and LexisNexis duolopoly has had stranglehold on people's access to legal information for decades. But as John Markoff of the New York Times reports, their control of the nearly $5 billion legal publishing market is being challenged by a few organizations who believe the law should be freely accessible via the Internet.

...[Carl] Malamud [founder of public.resource.org] and a diverse group of backers argue that the control of publishing court rulings subverts the original intent of the framers of the Constitution by making the nation's laws difficult to obtain by those outside the legal profession.

In a letter to West Publishing last Wednesday, Mr. Malamud said his intent was to make federal and state court decisions available to a population that cannot afford the subscription costs.

Legal codes and cases are the 'operating system' of the nation, he said. 'The system only works if we can all openly read the primary sources,' he said in the letter. 'It is crucial that the public domain data be available for anybody to build upon.'

Malamud is not alone. A joint effort by Columbia Law School's Program on Law and Technology and the Silicon Flatirons program at the University of Colorado Law School called AltLaw is going to provide free access to the last decade of federal appellate and Supreme Court opinions.

Tim Wu, a Columbia law professor told the times:

I'm a legal academic and I woke up one day and thought, 'Why can't I get cases the same way I get stuff on Google? People should be able to get cases easily. This is a big exception to the way information has opened up over the past decade.

And Justia's Tim Stanley, who Thomson West fired after acquiring Find Law which Tim co-founded, told the Times:

There is supposed to be no ignorance of the law, and yet it's not even accessible to most people.

Justia is spending about $10,000 a month to send people to copy documents at the Supreme Court so the company can place it online for free access.

With the advancement of the net, our case law, code law, law reviews, and legal periodicals are going to go open source - perhaps at alarming rate to Thomson and LexisNexis. Like software companies, the dualopoly will need to sell services and value add products associated with the law to protect their revenues.

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