5 ms·

I'm sure a company like Google or Bing would be more than happy to store, index and serve the pages.

hendzen 8y ago
its very important that this be handled by an independent party. Imagine if google was party to a lawsuit and could monitor what filings their legal opponents were looking at.
- jimktrains2 8y ago
  Independent in what sense? Is there any entity who couldn't be sued? Also, I'd imagine (hope) Google wasn't _the_ source, but instead a better interface/search engine over the data.
- sthu11182 8y ago
  i think you misunderstand some of the purposes monitoring a filing. the general purpose of monitoring a filing is to hopefully have a legal opinion that supports your argument. the whole purpose is to cite it so your opponent responds to it and the judge agrees with you. knowing what filings your legal opponents are looking at does not provide an advantage. the law is the law. your opponent is going to cite the case in a brief, and you will respond to their citation. despite what tv shows, there is no perry mason moment. trials are not about surprises, the main gist is set in stone. and you will piss off a judge if you start citing cases in oral arguments that are not in your brief. ive seen it happen.
sthu11182 8y ago
While it does not include filings, Google Scholar does have legal opinions. However, as far as I can tell, the collection of material has always been a bit random to me. By this, I mean Google Scholar includes published cases with proper citations (though I'm not sure for what years and its completeness) and a random collection of unpublished cases (not sure the rhyme or reason for some rulings being there and others not). Random side note, Bloomberg Law is the only service I am aware of that allows you to do a pretty complete keyword search of PACER (at least for federal district courts, state courts vary). I'm pretty sure Westlaw and Lexis do not do this (also they charge an exorbitant price to do a search, while Bloomberg charges the PACER fee for the first time a document is pulled by anyone plus the seat the license fee). Docket Navigator is a pretty good product too.
- DannyBee 8y ago
  The collection is random precisely because we could not get folks like PACER to give us data, even when we offered to pay for the cost of production. The scholar team is small. Anurag[1] thought there was no reason law shouldn't be accessible to normal people too. So we pushed on that direction (I lead an eng team in DC at the time that worked on opening up data that should have been open. We also did election information, etc). Once PACER/et all turned them down, i'm pretty sure they made some deals but there really wasn't a good and complete source. Worse, lots of states/etc had locked themselves into exclusive deals and so couldn't give us the data if they wanted to. (They were actually happy to be locked in, it turns out). They do have some fairly good feeds from paid sources but ... Anurag is very persistent, but even here, i think he's been focusing on other areas that are more useful to people. [1] https://www.wired.com/2014/10/the-gentleman-who-made-scholar/ https://www.wired.com/2014/10/the-gentleman-who-made-scholar...
  - ikeboy 8y ago
    Do you at least pull whatever is in RECAP?
    - toomuchtodo 8y ago
      Not sure if they do, but RECAP pushes data to the Internet Archive, so anyone can pull that PACER data back out. https://blog.archive.org/2017/02/13/internet-archive-offers-to-host-pacer-data/ https://blog.archive.org/2017/02/13/internet-archive-offers-...
  - sthu11182 8y ago
    random question, have yall ever thought to separate the google scholar part from legal part. I know its a simple button click, but they are really different outputs. I use both, mainly the scholar part for finding prior art references in patent litigations, and the legal searches to find citations. I would also think it would help on the branding. either way, thanks for putting together a product that really helps.
DannyBee 8y ago
Google actually offered about 10 years ago not only to do that, but to pay the judiciary for the cost to get us the data, and to publish easily accessible continuously updated complete data dumps (IE so you download the xml for it all) . PACER turned it down. Mainly because they make hundreds of millions on it, and this would stop them from doing that. (and since people seem to have crazy views - no, google did not expect to make any money by doing this)
- sthu11182 8y ago
  That is unfortunate. It would have driven legal costs down on legal search costs. WestLaw/LexisNexis have their place with their headers, but most of the time I am looking for a nuanced fact pattern in unpublished cases.

its very important that this be handled by an independent party. Imagine if google was party to a lawsuit and could monitor what filings their legal opponents were looking at.

jimktrains2 8y ago
Independent in what sense? Is there any entity who couldn't be sued? Also, I'd imagine (hope) Google wasn't _the_ source, but instead a better interface/search engine over the data.
sthu11182 8y ago
i think you misunderstand some of the purposes monitoring a filing. the general purpose of monitoring a filing is to hopefully have a legal opinion that supports your argument. the whole purpose is to cite it so your opponent responds to it and the judge agrees with you. knowing what filings your legal opponents are looking at does not provide an advantage. the law is the law. your opponent is going to cite the case in a brief, and you will respond to their citation. despite what tv shows, there is no perry mason moment. trials are not about surprises, the main gist is set in stone. and you will piss off a judge if you start citing cases in oral arguments that are not in your brief. ive seen it happen.

sthu11182 8y ago

While it does not include filings, Google Scholar does have legal opinions. However, as far as I can tell, the collection of material has always been a bit random to me. By this, I mean Google Scholar includes published cases with proper citations (though I'm not sure for what years and its completeness) and a random collection of unpublished cases (not sure the rhyme or reason for some rulings being there and others not). Random side note, Bloomberg Law is the only service I am aware of that allows you to do a pretty complete keyword search of PACER (at least for federal district courts, state courts vary). I'm pretty sure Westlaw and Lexis do not do this (also they charge an exorbitant price to do a search, while Bloomberg charges the PACER fee for the first time a document is pulled by anyone plus the seat the license fee). Docket Navigator is a pretty good product too.

DannyBee 8y ago
The collection is random precisely because we could not get folks like PACER to give us data, even when we offered to pay for the cost of production. The scholar team is small. Anurag[1] thought there was no reason law shouldn't be accessible to normal people too. So we pushed on that direction (I lead an eng team in DC at the time that worked on opening up data that should have been open. We also did election information, etc). Once PACER/et all turned them down, i'm pretty sure they made some deals but there really wasn't a good and complete source. Worse, lots of states/etc had locked themselves into exclusive deals and so couldn't give us the data if they wanted to. (They were actually happy to be locked in, it turns out). They do have some fairly good feeds from paid sources but ... Anurag is very persistent, but even here, i think he's been focusing on other areas that are more useful to people. [1] https://www.wired.com/2014/10/the-gentleman-who-made-scholar/ https://www.wired.com/2014/10/the-gentleman-who-made-scholar...
- ikeboy 8y ago
  Do you at least pull whatever is in RECAP?
  - toomuchtodo 8y ago
    Not sure if they do, but RECAP pushes data to the Internet Archive, so anyone can pull that PACER data back out. https://blog.archive.org/2017/02/13/internet-archive-offers-to-host-pacer-data/ https://blog.archive.org/2017/02/13/internet-archive-offers-...
- sthu11182 8y ago
  random question, have yall ever thought to separate the google scholar part from legal part. I know its a simple button click, but they are really different outputs. I use both, mainly the scholar part for finding prior art references in patent litigations, and the legal searches to find citations. I would also think it would help on the branding. either way, thanks for putting together a product that really helps.

DannyBee 8y ago

Google actually offered about 10 years ago not only to do that, but to pay the judiciary for the cost to get us the data, and to publish easily accessible continuously updated complete data dumps (IE so you download the xml for it all) . PACER turned it down. Mainly because they make hundreds of millions on it, and this would stop them from doing that. (and since people seem to have crazy views - no, google did not expect to make any money by doing this)

sthu11182 8y ago
That is unfortunate. It would have driven legal costs down on legal search costs. WestLaw/LexisNexis have their place with their headers, but most of the time I am looking for a nuanced fact pattern in unpublished cases.