I am not a lawyer but I from my computational linguistics background I have some experience with Legal English: 1. From my admittedly limited experience legal

I am not a lawyer but I from my computational linguistics background I have some experience with Legal English: 1. From my admittedly limited experience legal language, while certainly complex, follows a clear set of rules to the extent its almost formulaic. There's no pragmatics (pragmatics is the main reason we don't have generalised natural language understanding yet: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pragmatics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pragmatics ) involved. Legal language is precise and its primary objective is to avoid ambiguity or potential for misinterpretation. These features actually make legal documents a perfect area for application of NLP algorithms. 2. Frankly, I think this is outrageous. It's "Common Law" for a reason. How can one expect someone to abide by the law if the law is not commonly known but that knowledge is restricted to a select few? How law firms like those you mentioned could arrive at thinking about copyrighting legal decisions and thinking that's even remotely ethical is beyond me.